18 Ways to Speed Up Your Backcountry Ski Experience (without spending a lot)

In backcountry skiing, as with most mountain sports, it’s easy to spend a lot of time focusing on the concept of going light. Whether you’re into mountain biking, camping, hiking, backcountry skiing, or a host of other mountain-based pastimes, lightweight gear is available. But it all comes at a price, and typically, the lighter the gear, the heftier the price tag. As I’ve written before, that’s fair: more design engineering should garner a higher sales price.

But if your funds are running a bit low, you need not fret. There are numerous ways to speed up one’s backcountry ski experience without dropping a ton of cash. If you’re tired of trying to buy performance, try out these easy, fast, and mostly free tricks to speed up your backcountry outings.

A zero gram wallet? It's easier than it looks if one simply tries to buy performance with pricy gear. There's more to being fast than simply shopping.

18 Ways to Speed up Your Backcountry Ski Experience (without spending a lot)

1. Stop taking off your backpack. One of the most vital ideas is to work out your system so that you need not stop and remove your pack all the time. Stopping to remove your backpack, rummage through it, buckle it back up, put it back on, and rebuckle the straps eats time like piranha on a dead cow in the river. Try to only remove your pack at the top of your run. On a good day, you need not even take it off then.

Taking off one's backpack to rummage through it takes up a lot of time. Especially if you do it repeatedly.

2. Attach a water bottle holder to your backpack’s shoulder strap. Then you need not rummage around for a water bottle. You’ll also be more aware of how much water you’ve got remaining, alleviating the ugly surprise of the last sip.

Mounting a bottle holder on your backpack's shoulder straps is the genius proposition these days. Pic by Borro.

3. Stick with sunglasses. Goggles, while awesome at their purpose of keeping harmful UV rays and snow off your eyeballs, just eat up time. They fog mercilessly on the uphill. Once you’ve figured that out, you tend to keep them in your backpack on the approach. But that means you’ve got to rummage through your sack once you reach the top. Or, you’ve left them affixed to your helmet on the outside of your pack, where snow has covered the inside of the lens. Not cool.

Alleviate the search time for goggles, as well as the transition time involved in switching between sunglasses and goggles. Just wear sunglasses. Trade a little bit of watery eye on your descent for a big chunk of time savings.

4. Keep moving. Even when you’re tired, you can usually keep moving if you simply slow the pace a bit. Stopping to stand in once place eats time faster than anything. Even if you’re out of breath after climbing a steep section, you can catch your breath and cover ground simultaneously if you move at an easy pace.

5. Utilize pockets to keep essentials nearby. Hip pockets on backpacks are awesome because you can carry your gels or other frequently desired items within easy reach. Baselayer pockets, coat pockets, and pants pockets can all be used the same way. Like to repeatedly apply Chapstick or sunscreen? Keep it where you can reach it easily. Carry hand warmers in your pockets too, and use them if your hands get cold. Stopping to put on a burlier pair of gloves mid-approach is slow stuff. Instead, open a packet of handwarmers on the go, and toss ‘em into your gloves.

6. Do the basics at home. Sure, that means applying skins before you head out to meet your pals. But it also means adjusting bindings to fit your boots, adjusting your DIN settings, making sure your skins fit the day’s skis, as well as any other necessary gear tweaks. If you’ve recently bought new gear, ensure that it works with your other gear – and is dialed in to your proportions – before you head out to the hills.

7. Get rid of the hydration hose. Hoses freeze all the time, even if you regularly clear out the tube. If you get rid of this nuisance, you need not spend time trying to clear ice to get your paltry sips of water. Bottles freeze too, but not nearly as fast as hoses. By using a bottle, you’ll not only not waste time dealing with ice, you’ll be better hydrated, which is key to mountain movement. Hint: If your bottle begins to freeze, simply put it inside your coat for a while. Your body heat will thaw it out.

That's a lot of ice between a man and his next sip.

8. Eat and hydrate regularly, even when it’s cold out. During the cold of winter, it’s easy to move for hours on end without feeling thirsty. Our bodies are evaporating water all the time, whether you’re aware of that through symptoms of thirst or not.

Research indicates that losing as little as 2% of your body’s water (just over a liter for a 170 pound individual) causes a noticeable decrease in performance level. Keeping your fluid levels in line will keep you feeling as good as possible. Concurrently, maintaining an adequate calorie intake while on the move will provide more energy to burn.

9. Get the food and water in beforehand. Human powered backcountry skiing is hard work. It helps to think of it as serious exercise, rather than merely a fun day on skis. Accordingly, you should eat and hydrate as much as possible prior to skiing. Before you head out, as well as during the drive to the trailhead, you’ll want to quaff an abundance of fluids.  The more you get inside your body beforehand is all the less (heavy) liquid and food you need carry on your ski day. Besides, fluids in the body are vastly more effective at hydrating you than fluids in a backpack.

10. Put your skins into your coat when it’s time to descend. Unless you’re about to engage in a technical descent involving a rappel or downclimbing (for which you don’t want to be worrying about having a skin fall out of your coat mid-action), most ski descents happen pretty quickly. Putting your skins in your coat is a slightly chilling maneuver, but I like to think it just helps to keep one cool during the heat of a descent. Or something like that. Regardless, it’s a lot faster to unzip a coat and slide in some skins than to put them into a backpack.

11. Work on your transitions. Switching from uphill to downhill mode, and vice versa, need not take a lot of time. Experienced skiers get through these moves in a few seconds. Practice by finding a relatively short slope and doing a ton of laps (ie., transitions), rather than doing just a few long laps.

12. Wax your skis. No matter how well you ski, having a decent, recently applied coat of wax will make your skis slide faster on the downhill. The simple physics behind decreased friction come into play during skiing, if you’ve got wax on your planks. As a bonus, well-waxed skis allow a skin to be removed more easily during transitions.

13. Keep snow off your skins. If the day is warm, snow will tend to stick to your skins, leading

You're not going anywhere fast when your skins accumulate snow like this.

to a non-sliding, bulky weight on the bottom of your skis. Prevent this by wiping skin wax on your skins at the trailhead. Or, go whole hog and re-do the original factory waterproofing. Don’t let snow buildup make your day tougher and longer, as it most certainly will.

14. Start cold. Wear the same clothing rig out of the trailhead parking lot that you usually strip down to once you’ve been moving for a while. Trust that you’re going to warm up quickly – you always have in the past. That in mind, wear a thick, insulated coat while pulling on your boots and gathering your gear at the trailhead. When it’s time to skin, ditch that coat in the vehicle. You’ll probably be chilly for the first few minutes, until your body’s heat starts to rev up. Ideally, you should be able to complete your entire approach in the same thin layers, unless a storm rolls in or other adversity presents itself.

15. Regulate your body temperature with a hat, in addition to step 14 above. Taking off or pulling on a hat is one of the fastest ways to moderate your body temp. Stow the hat inside your coat – ideally in the interior skin pocket – when you’ve warmed up. Getting a bit chilly out there in the howling winds? Pull the hat back on. Easy peasy. And fast warmth.

16. Know your gear intimately. If you’ve never once assembled your probe pole, simply because no one around you has ever been buried yet, you’re not doing your partners any favors. Nor yourself. Know how all of your gear works, by taking the time to work with it in the comfort of your home. This way, if you encounter gear failure, you’ll have a better idea of how to approach a field repair. Plus, by knowing how it works, you’ll be faster at using it.

17. Know the route beforehand. Nothing eats time like going the wrong way to your chosen destination and then having to backtrack. Look at maps, examine the route, learn as much as possible about it beforehand, or go with someone who knows the way.

18. Train. Oh yes, training will make you faster, too. It may not be entirely ‘free’ because it will drive up your grocery bill mildly, but it’s one of the most effective ‘mostly free’ ways to get a bit faster. More than worth it in the long run, if you consider the health benefits.

Wrapping it Up

There they are, 18 relatively simple, nearly free ways that can help you speed up your backcountry experience. Going Light(er), Fast(er), and Far(ther) need not break the bank. It’s good form to master basics like these before dropping a lot of money on the ultra-light stuff. Otherwise, you sorta end up trying to buy performance rather than simply performing.