Trending towards full-on skin failure.
Prevent a dour mood with a solutions oriented perspective on ski skin failures: two easy methods to keep you on the skintrack.
Failure is part of the life journey. No real platitudes here, but failures are relative. In the backcountry, skin failure is a relatively manageable type of failure. It can ruin your day in the short term — without properly functioning skins, it’s downright difficult to make efficient uphill progress.
What is Skin Failure?
Well, it’s a bummer. Beyond that, it’s when the skin glue becomes ineffective in the field. Skin failure often occurs on cold days when powdery snow works its way between the skin and the ski base while ascending. Over time, the powdery snow morphs into a thin layer of ice on the glue surface. Where that thin layer of ice persists, the skin glue won’t effectively adhere to the ski base. If the ice layer is lengthy enough, or, say, near the tip or tail, you might have yourself a case of skin failure.
The purpose of this piece is to compartmentalize skin failure into a manageable scenario, not a disaster scenario.
Emerging Skin Failure
On cold powdery snow days, it might help your skin failure cause to warm the skins up occasionally by placing them near your core. Take a scenario where you are lapping runs and ice buildups on the skin glue. Every other run after ripping skins, place those nicely folded skins between your fleece mid-layer and outer jacket or puffy. Doing so warms the skin, and hopefully, the ice layer melts.
Before reapplying the warmed skins, wipe any noticeable water from the glue, let the skins cool a moment or two to reach air temperature, and then reapply.
Trending towards full-on skin failure.
Full-On Skin Failure
Ok, we’re nearing a disaster scenario where type II fun ceases. Imagine you’ve neglected to warm skins, or you have been grinding for hours ascending a Teton approach, and it’s dark, and you never noticed the snow/ice building up under the skin. You initiate a kick turn, feeling spry and all that, and lickity split, you nearly faceplant, and your uphill skin sits limp and twisted and afflicted with a severe case of failure.
We’ve got a solution.
Step 1) Right yourself. Take a deep breath and a swig of tea.
Step 2) Pop your ski off and insert the tail firmly in the snow, with the ski base facing away from you. You’re about to use the edges of this now vertical ski to good effect.
Step 3) Grab and position the skin so the glue side faces the ski base. Now take the tip and tail of the skin, and pull back and forth. This motion will effectively run the skin’s glue side over the ski’s edges, warming the skin and rubbing off the snow and ice.
Step 4) Reapply skin, smile, ascend, drop in.
Let’s imagine the above solution doesn’t work. The skin still has a section or two that won’t properly adhere to the ski base. There’s an in-the-field fix.
Be prepared for disaster, as this is where having a few spare Voilee/Titan Straps comes in handy.
If the tail section is affected, starting at the tail, fold the skin over about 12″. Now use a strap to secure the folded portion onto the ski. As long as the tip attachment is secure, the skin should remain under some tension. With this temporary fix, the tail won’t flop around, nor should it slide down or off the ski.
This fix isn’t ideal, but it should get you back to the trailhead or up the slope for one more run. There you have it, some solutions-oriented skin failure scenarios.
This video from G3 does a great job illustrating the full-on skin failure solutions.