Ski Touring/Ski Mountaineering-Out of Season Question

[malrobb]

Hi All,

I appreciate that this is an out of season question and that this is a Walk Highlands and not a Ski Highlands forum but after a bit of advice around ski touring.

I am a fairly competent downhill skier having learnt to ski as a kid in Scotland, foreign holidays and I was also lucky enough to live in Canada for a couple of years meaning skiing every weekend. However, I have never done any ski touring/ski mountaineering. I am a keen Munro bagger and will be half way round this year and just wanted to gauge how easy is it to "pick up" ski touring as hopefully it would only be the skinning part that I would have to learn. I appreciate that there are the associated avalanche skills etc which I have done to some extent on a winter skills course. Would people recommend going on a dedicated ski touring course or is it a case of just going for it with the right kit (I only have downhill ski kit at the moment)? I appreciate that some Munros are more conducive to ski touring than others eg the Cairngorms, Drumochter munros but if you are prepared to carry and bootpack are most of the Munros accessible in winter? If anyone can comment on the above or give any other pointers around learning ski touring, good sources of information or any other kit advice it would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Mal

[prog99]

Depends on what winter brings and how keen you are as to what’s skiable.

As an experienced winter hill goer you can probably get away without a course but it does help to know how to put your skins on and off efficiently and doing kick turns in steeper terrain.

Some of our trips are written up here (mixed in with some European jaunts) https://www.prog99.com/Winter%20Sports/index.html

[jmarkb]

Good advice from prog99 - a weekend course would be useful, but you could just go for it, especially if you can find a partner or two to go out with (which also obviously has safety advantages if in avalanche terrain). Probably at least half of the Munros are realistic ski touring destinations - some are rather remote and others are too steep/rocky or don't hold snow well on the ridges. The definitive guidebook is the SMC one: https://www.smc.org.uk/publications/other/ski-mountaineering. There are also some good instruction books - try this one https://www.pesdapress.com/index.php/product/ski-touring/ for example.

[prog99]

Should also have mentioned, if you’ve a Facebook account then British Backcountry is a good resource. The admin runs courses including on the hillend dry slope!

[malrobb]

Thanks both for taking the time to reply. Some good links there and will check out British Backcountry group on FB. The other thing I was thinking was perhaps hiring kit and i think there are a few places in Aviemore that can do it.

Thanks

Mal