Pick Your Poison – Methods of Ascent

For ski mountaineering, there are three main methods of traveling over snow; skinning, booting or snowshoeing.  Of these three, skinning is by far and away the most efficient and versatile.  Booting works well when there is an existing boot track, or when the going gets steep.  Snowshoes are better than crawling, but not by much.  Regardless of which method you choose, a critical factor is that everyone in your group uses the same system as the pace and route selection is radically different with each one.  A skin track will wander much more than a boot track and snowshoes will be somewhere in-between.  If you find yourself in a mixed group, the first discussion you should have is where, or if, you will regroup when your party gets separated, because they soon will.