Note:

Winter recreation in the back-country comes with inherent risk. Avalanche education and gear is a must. Visit the Utah Avalanche Center or your local center for more information. At the very least, watch this video and educate yourself about avalanche terrain, risks, and awareness: Know Before You Go

All tours embarked on with our kids so far are in low angle, safe terrain, free from avalanche hazard and during stable conditions.

Like all good adventures, backcountry skiing has been a journey. I grew up skiing strictly inbounds on lift-accessed terrain. I was lucky enough to cat ski in highschool at Grand Targhee Resort and to this day have yet to heli-ski. However, a handful of years ago my husband and I began backcountry skiing, gathering the equipment, taking classes and courses on avalanche safety, and began earning our turns.

During this process (and much longer ago than I want to admit) I wrote about taking our kids into the backcountry. You can read about how we started by carrying our kids ski gear while they hiked up. This worked great on hard pack snow where we were basically skiing a forest road or something similar.

However, like all good humans, they continued to grow, have longer and longer skis, and/or wanted to ski harder terrain, and all the sudden carrying their gear and skiing only a road wasn’t gonna cut it anymore. Our solution had two parts:

Backcountry Adaptors

CAMP makes a product called the Contour Kids Touring Adaptor. Simply snap the adaptor in your downhill ski bindings, attach the boot, put skins on the skis and your kid can travel uphill with you.

I have mixed feelings about this approach. These adaptors allowed us to get our kids into the backcountry without having to buy them a whole new ski set up. We cut down old skins from friends, used our kids already-purchased resort gear, and headed uphill. They were a HUGE part of how we got to where we are today: two kids who love touring and one who is on a local Skimo racing team.

HOWEVER, these set ups have some downsides, namely weight and awkwardness. They are heavy and tricky to manage. Often our kids didn’t want to go longer than 30 minutes in uphill mode and our youngest would rather boot up, carrying her own skis, than use the adaptors. I’ll be honest, in our household we’ve nicknames the alpine trekkers – “day wreckers.” 🙂

I think the weight and effort headed uphill was also less appealing to our kids who regularly ski 30+ days on chair-accessed terrain every season. We were and still are fighting the battle of keeping uphill skiing fun… and as our older kids moved on to lighter and faster AT gear, the fun increased by 100%.

TowWhee Strap

This is a great place to mention the use of a TwoWhee Strap. This product was originally designed for mountain biking and  contains a high stretch bungee cord inside an ultra strong hollow webbing. TowWhee makes a 4-season strap that can be used for skiing, hiking, snowshoeing, etc. Any situation where your kid might need a small boost to help them get up the uphill.

We now joke that we are going to attach the Towwhee strap to our teenager and let her tow US up the hill. We are only kind of kidding. 🙂

The TowWhee strap has been revolutionary for mountain biking in our family and we just started using it this winter for touring. I’d highly suggest you check out their waist strap for attachment on the adult end and some sort of harness for attachment on the child’s end. TowWhee has a modified harness you can try or a kids climbing harness would work great as well.

Other Options

The options I shared above are not the only options. I know many parents who have used telemark skis/boots for touring with kids, and/or modified cross country gear. I’d imagine these are great options! One Kid Project reader shared:

“get the kids into cross-country shoes (15 EUR used) /bindings (25 EUR used) mounted on and old pair of straight skis with skins riveted (to prevent loosening and worries about glue – you will only need them for the uphill part). take regular alpine boots and skis in your (adult) backpack… You will be surprised by how much easier it is for the kids too keep the pace up with you (in our case I have to struggle to keep the pace up with them). We have been using this technique for the last 3 seasons (the kids are now 6 years old) and we are in the 2-3 hour/5 mile/3,000 vertical feet per trip range now – see the videos above.. The older son (9 years old now) just reached shoe size sufficient for the smallest Women´s boots (very expensive pair of TLT6 (350 EUR)- but very light) + Dynafit speed turn (200 EUR new) + pair of Salomon 90mm skis (about 120 EUR)”

Going all in – Spending the money on touring gear

As our oldest neared the teenage years, and as she became a passionate and fast uphill hiker (self-motivated, no urging necessary), we decided to have her try the local SkiMo team. In short, SkiMo is ascending and descending mountains on your own energy using touring gear.  This meant one thing – we needed to take the leap of faith and spend the money on touring gear for her.

I am not the expert on light and fast alpine touring gear – so we turned to Skimo.co, because they are the pros. It is of interest to note that as we entered the SkiMo community, more and more options for purchasing used gear (kid specific or just small) opened up to us and we now have two kids fully outfitted for the backcountry.

Anibel, our age 13 racer, has the race specific skis – Voile Wasatch Speed Girls, Plum bindings, paired with a 24.5 Dynafit TLT7 boot found on the SkiMo Facebook classifieds. Note: The Voilé WSG is manufactured in a single length of 150cm, the minimum length allowed for females by the ISMF in SkiMo racing. This also means she will be in this size the entirety of her career – yay! NO buying new skis every year (unless she decides she need pow skis…)!

For our son we took a different direction – he might dabble in SkiMo racing but at the tender age of 11, he (so far) simply loves getting out, hucking a few rocks and skiing powder; so we found a used set up that is a more traditional ski: The Dynafit SL 80 with Dynafit bindings and we paired that with used Atomic Backland (women’s) boots we found at a local shop. Feel free when buying used gear for kids to skip between genders! Women’s boots come in smaller/low volume options which often fit younger better. We got lucky and the boots are orange and black.

SO far we have no regrets regarding gear. Our one warning? Once your kids try a lighter touring setup – no way will they want to go back to adaptors… as our youngest can attest.

Please share your thoughts, experiences, and ideas below!

Look for the next installment in our series: What is SkiMo? Backcountry Skiing with Kids