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March, 2008-- Too often they stick to stuff when you don't
want them to, and they have been known to fail to stick at the
worst possible moments. Leave them in a hot, closed up car parked
at a trailhead and you very well might come back to find that
the glue has turned to a gooey mess. Drop them on the ground
and watch them pick up dirt and little rocks that you'll never
be able to completely remove. And of course there is the ever
popular spectacle of watching your ski partners struggle mightily
to put them together for storage in a pack, glue-side to glue-slide,
at the top of a windy peak. For these and other reasons, Canadian
inventor Kaj Gyr thinks it's time to revisit the concept of glue-less
climbing skins, an approach that was tried and eventually abandoned
well more than a decade ago.
You may have heard Gyr's name before:
some months back we mentioned in a Tele News piece that he is
the creator of Black Diamond's still-in-development tele binding
and boot system, a system that BD hopes will eventually compete
with Rottefella's NTN to redefine the way we attach our telemark
boots to our skis. As Gyr told us recently, "as a backcountry
skier and an inventor, my goal is to identify gear that I feel
can be improved upon, then come up with ways to make that happen.
With all of their well-known usability and durability issues,
climbing skins seemed like an obvious candidate for a new approach."
Make that a new/old approach. Some
longtime backcountry skiers may remember glue-less skins from
back in the early 90s. They had a whole bunch of straps along
their length, extending around the edges and fastening on top
of the ski. The straps would get mangled by the sharp metal edges,
and the straps themselves interfered with edge hold significantly,
making even mildly steep traverses on firm snow difficult, if
not altogether impossible. These strap-on skins did have one
advantage over the more expensive models using glue: they were
often quite cheap, sometimes available for as little as half
the price, or less. This alone made strap-on skins attractive,
after all, it was the era of the backcountry skier-as-dumpster
diver, and newcomers to the sport would often buy these strapped
contraptions only to quickly figure out how badly they sucked.
Eventually word got around, and the concept, as executed then,
died a well deserved death.
Now here we are many years later.
Our skis and skins are much fatter, and all this width just might
make it possible to try something new to hold the climbing skin
tightly to the ski base. Recognizing this opportunity, Kaj has
come up with an approach that uses pre-bent "battens"
running parallel along the length of the skin.
The slight bend built into the battens
flattens out upon installation, snugging the skin quite tightly
to the ski's base.
In our prototype, Kaj used just
two special straps to keep the skin from rotating off the ski,
one in the area of the ski forebody, and another back toward
the tail.
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For durability, Kaj makes the portion
of the strap which extends around the ski's edges out of stainless
steel.
In addition to making it possible
for the straps to hold up against the ski's sharp edges, the
first time the skin is installed, the steel portion bends and
conforms to the shape of the ski for a very positive fit, also
making the strapping process during subsequent installations
quick and easy. |
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In the prototype Gyr sent us for
testing and feedback earlier this season, he used standard tip
and tail attachment hardware, and built it using
(surprise!) material and parts from Black Diamond's Ascencion
STS skins. This custom made model was fabricated to fit my preferred
180cm length skis, and in a way that allows its three sections
to be folded into a package 27 inches (68.5cm) long, the idea
being that users will be able to stow these new skins alongside
their probe and shovel. For those who carry larger, body-bag
type packs in the backcountry, the 27 inch length would probably
work out fine. I typically use a smaller pack on day tours, making
the folded length of this prototype problematic.
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At this length the prototype skin
we have is quite a bit longer than both my shovel and probe,
which as it is barely fit into my favorite day pack.
Kaj says that he thinks he can make
the skins with four separate panels instead of three, reducing
the folded length enough to allow the skins to fit into smaller
packs. This may require the addition of a third strap, but whether
or not this will truly be necessary remains to be seen. |
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Based on a limited amount of testing
over the course of the past couple of months, I will report on
the results and conclusions we have drawn so far in Part Two
of this First Look. We also have a short video showing Kaj's
invention in action-- stay tuned for more. |
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