Freeride Touring Gear Guide: Skis, Boots and Bindings That Earn Their Turns
Freeride touring is what we love most: walk up, ride the line nobody else got to. Here is the gear that makes it work, from skis and boots to the pin-versus-hybrid binding question.
Freeride touring is two classic disciplines welded together: ski touring and freeride. No lift. You get up the mountain under your own steam so you can ride down untracked faces, steep lines or deep tree runs that the lift crowd never reaches.
At Snowbusters it is the thing we love most. Sometimes that means skinning from the car park. Sometimes it means a 30-minute walk away from the top lift. Either way the logic is the same: resorts get tracked out within hours of opening, and a pair of skins is the cheapest lift ticket to fresh snow ever invented.
The freeride touring kit list
- Skis with touring bindings and climbing skins, or a splitboard
- Touring boots with a walk mode
- Adjustable poles
- Avalanche transceiver, shovel and probe. Not optional, ever.
- When the line calls for it: ice axe, crampons, harness, rope and an abseil device
Skis: built for the down, light enough for the up
Skis are like golf clubs: different ones for different jobs. For fast laps on mellow terrain, a short, light, skinny ski is perfect. Freeride touring asks for more. Steep, fast, variable descents need a ski that will not fold when you lean on it, and that ski still has to go uphill. Balancing performance against weight is the whole trick, and carbon in the layup is how most brands now pull it off.
Our rule of thumb: 100 to 120 mm underfoot, and a bit longer than you are tall. The full reasoning is in our guide on how to choose freeride and touring skis.
The Snowbusters team rides DOWN SKIS, a small factory-direct brand that builds exactly this kind of ski. We are a small outfit ourselves and like working with people who obsess over the same things we do. You can test them on most of our trips: see the DOWN demo.
Boots: fit first, everything else second
Same logic as skis. A freeride touring boot is stiff and powerful, lighter than a resort boot, heavier than a pure touring boot. But more important than stiffness or grams is fit. We speak from painful experience: boots make or break your day, and no ski on earth rescues a week of blisters.
Give yourself time, try on a lot of pairs, see a proper bootfitter, and be flexible on price. A boot that fits is worth every cent. What to look for:
- Flex index between 100 and 130
- Three or four buckles
- Tech inserts, so it works with pin bindings
- Crew favourites over the years: Tecnica Zero G Tour Pro and Dalbello Lupo, with Dynafit a popular pick among the women on the team
Bindings: pin, frame or hybrid?
Whatever you choose, it has to be a touring binding with a free heel for the climb. After that, pick for how you ride.
- Pin (tech) bindings: far lighter and much nicer to walk on. A robust freeride pin binding handles big vertical days, powder and couloirs without complaint. Several of us ride the ATK Freeraider 14.
- Frame bindings: an alpine-style binding on a hinged frame. Familiar downhill feel and release, but heavy, and you lift the whole thing with every step. Fine for short walks from the lift, tiring for real touring.
- Hybrid bindings: pins for the climb, an alpine-style toe and heel for the descent. The Salomon S/Lab Shift is the well-known example. If your riding involves big uphill days and even bigger airs, this is your category.
The part that matters more than gear
The fanciest setup in the world does not read an avalanche bulletin for you. Before you head out, get familiar with the avalanche safety basics and your beacon, shovel and probe.
Now go use it
Gear questions? Ask us, we will happily talk skis for far too long. Ready to ride? These are the freeride touring trips we run: