A 20 oz nalgene in the pack with nuun tablets or Gatorade powder and another fold-able 16oz sawyer on the body with a nuun tablet or Gatorade powder. Use the fold-able first and then the 20oz. Whether I bring both or one is dependent on the objective for a one day tour.

This helps reduce pack weight/lost volume by not needing a huge nalgene that takes up alot of space. By adding the nuun/gatorade it will reduce the freezing point slightly. If it gets real cold use a coozy on the nalgene or make one out of reflectix.

Reflectix Construction Go By
https://backpackinglight.com/forums/topic/17522/

FloImSchnee wrote:

I also wouldn’t want 5-10 minutes for my partner just to drink.
You for sure lose more time by melting snow to drink it, as for the additional effort for 0,5-2 litres of water in your backpack.

you mean you rip shred all day and don’t take a few 5-10 min breaks??

i shouldn’t speak for @whistlermaverick cuz i can’t remember exactly how he works it (i was taking 4:20 min breaks for his 5-10 mins)… but when i take my stove i also take a 500mL wide mouth bottle… then ya don’t have to fire up the stove every time ya drink.
And it helps to put 100mL water in the pot when you start to melt the snow, so you don’t burn the pot with dry snow.
(it happens – bottom of snow in pot melts and evaporates but the plug doesn’t settle to the bottom and the bottom overheats, yuck! if you have no water you gotta start with the stove on low and keep pushing the snow down until the bottom is well wet)

Say ya take 3 or 4 breaks in a day (15 mins each) then you can fill your belly and your bottle, and your partner’s too. each person could use a small bottle or maybe 1L size, saving 1 to 1.5 kg each. And you have an added margin of safety – more hydrated, with the ability to make hot tea or soup if an emergency or overtime situation arises.

But each to their own i guess, i ride NS boards at 167cm, and I’m as likely to take steel as aluminum if i think i’ll need sharps. You guys are the weight weenies! I would just think its cheaper to save 1 – 1.5 kg with a stove rather than spending squillions on stuff that’ll disintegrate when you hit a rock.
Absurd is as absurd does, jus sayin!!

Your camel must get a good workout then.

Hey guys,

is this discussion really necessary (for the normal guys of us)? Of course a light setup helps to save energy and to fill out ones day even better. To be honest, is it really important to climb or ride some percentage more in a day, to be 5min faster than ones friends or to be able to catch skiers?

Its all about fun and enjoying good times in the mountains not about weight! Light weight parts mostly dont are as stable and longline than normal parts.

I`m doing a lot of sports all the time, in the past also competitions in running and cycling and what I hated most in these times that everybody focused on his equipment (bikes etc.) and quantity in training. Nearly nobody tried to improve his mental power or technique and most of these guys never had a smile in their faces.

Go out have fun, make your thoughts about weight of your equipment but always focus on enjoying the day and not about how much you drink and what or any other senseless facts. Instead of making thoughts about equipment go out and have fun, if there`s no snow go biking, running, swimming, climbing, enjoy nature and life and you will forget about saving pounds and just focus on getting out.

Heres my setup for days with 1500 to 2500m first track skinning and 4 to 7hours, I dont know how much pounds but it works and makes fun:
Boards: Chimera Mace 172, SG-Snowboards 160, G3 Scape Goat 162cm
Binding: Spark Dyno
Crampons: G3, Dynafit 130mm
Skins: G3, Kohla, Contour
Shoes: TLT5, TLT6, Arcteryx
Airbag: Mammut Protection 3.0 30l
Helmet, sun and snow glasses, Shovel, poles, gloves, (additional) clothes, beacon, camera 1-2l to drink, muesli bars…..
Sometimes lamp, rope, ice axe, climbing stuff and ice crampons

@buell

you are right, I don`t have to read and comment if I´m not interested……

For me it`s important to have long-lasting, reliable material not more and I´m wondering about people discussing about some grams or the perfect setup instead of searching for the perfect turn……

I didn`t want to upset, greets Mansi

Personally, I think there is a massive elephant in the room here.
We talk about trimming grams here and there, and then we happily walk around with more than twice as many holes and inserts in the boards than what we actually use.

And as far as I can make out those big insert things make lightweight board construction even more challenging since they severely limit what can be done with the core of the board. And even the weight weenies have adapter plates between their superlight Dynafit toe pieces and the board, using twice the number of screws that are really needed.

I have used ski screws to mount dynafit toe pieces to my board for years. It works fine on Venture boards that are solidly built. I have also done it to a K2 Panoramic and it feels a bit iffy but has worked fine for 20 days or so now. (I only use it for early season shark skipping, it is not even half as good as the Ventures when it is time for proper riding.)

For this year I got a set of ATK SLR Release bindings that I mounted straight on my old Venture Storm. The heel pieces are lighter than a set of voile double height climbing wires and give me a safe heel lockdown mode too for when I feel the need. Combined with the new Phantoms, fixed angle board cleats and Salomon SLabs it should make for a fairly light setup without any compromise whatsoever to the ride.

I wish there was a board with no inserts whatsoever but instead had “binding mounting zones” just like skis where I could mount board cleats directly with ski screws (or quiver killers), I bet it could be made way lighter and with nicer flex than the swiss cheese we are using now.

Ive been using this stove backpacking into september and october for 3 years now. It has a pretty good following in the ultralight backpacking community. Similar to the MSR but lighter and cheaper. I bought mine for less than $5 when they were first introduced. They can still be found on ebay pretty cheap. Only weights 25 grams

Marran,
I hear you on insert weight. When you work super hard to make a spotlight board, it is inconsistent to put .25 lbs of inserts in it. For a board selling north of 1000, they should be titanium. Ski screws work for a board I make for myself, but probably do not meet the ISO standard for screw retention which is likely the standard a mfg. will be sued under if not met.

I don’t know if the aluminum slider tracks are lighter, they might be. Also, most production boards are around 7 to 8 mm thick which isn’t a lot for screw retention. 11-12 mm or more is a lot better to hold a ski screw.

I’m not ready yet for the expense of titanium inserts, it is enough to use less steel ones for a custom board, but hopefully the industry will go there eventually. I would be real interested to know if 7000 series aluminum with a 7000 series m8 screw meets the ISO standard. Or how strong a ski screw is to pull out of hard maple or denser hardwood. There are numbers out there for standard screws but they have a lot less thread width.

marran wrote:

And even the weight weenies have adapter plates between their superlight Dynafit toe pieces and the board, using twice the number of screws that are really needed.

Phantom 14/15 Adapter Plates + 3 screws for mounting it on the Voile pattern: 2x 29g
No problem for me.

Do you have any idea of the weight of a single insert?

Btw: really cool thread, the lighter everything is (while being durable) the more energy I have left for the way down, enabling longer tours = longer fun. pretty simple

Edit: a list of my gear (nearly complete, but maybe I forgot something)

Ride:
Amplid Milligram 163 with Phantom Hercules Hooks, Solo Cleats, Superlight toepieces with adaper plates and Rocket Risers: 2x 1590g
Kohla Universal Skins: 2x 240g
or
Amplid Lab Carbon 162 with Phantom Hercules Hooks, Adjustable Cleats, radical toepieces with Spark adaper plates and voile dual rises with adaper plate: 2x 1835g
Kohla Skins: 2x 225g

Atomic Backland (modded): 2x 990g
Dynafit 130mm skicrampons: 232g

Backpack:
Voile shovel: 614g
BD probe: 310g
Pieps beacon: 210g
Mini 1st aid/bivi bag: 157g
BD Patrol 32 backpack: 1150g
Leki Carbon strong poles: 606g
Julbo sunglases: 91g
Julbo goggles: 146g
Petzl Nao headlamp: 185g
Salomon Mtn Lab Helmet: 418g

for glacier travel:
30m 7.8mm Tendon rope: 1285g
Petzl glacier harness + rescue kit + 1 icescrew + abseil stuff: 1146g
Petzl Ride iceaxe: 266g
Petzl Gully (with hammer) iceaxe: 288g
Petzl Irvis Hybrid crampons: 524 g (+100g for the bag, heavy but durable and does its job properly while the original one does not)

ozsnowbum wrote:

…Non-hardbooters I run into still often dont understand that carrying bindings in your pack while skinning is far superior to sliding your foot every step with a 500g binding attached. It is also not uncommon to see very poor skinning technique akin to lifting each foot like walking with snow shoes which makes efficiency even worse. Another benefit of this system is the ease and quickness of transitions, especially strapping bindingless skis to pack for boot packing.

I will agree with your original post that cutting grams absolutely matters. In fact, it makes an absolutely profound difference. You can look at any study on elite XC running: The less the athlete carries, the less Oxygen is required to perform the task.

Analysis of weight on feet VS. weight on pack:

In graduate school I studied oxygen consumption during exercise on a treadmill with different weights of rucksacks. Included with the study were different weights of mountaineering boots. All at a 8% grade, at 3mph.

I looked at pack weights of 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 pounds. And I used Chaco sandals, running shoes, lightweight mountaineering boots, and finally very very heavy old school leather mountaineering boots with an old steel shank.

What I found was oxygen consumption was significantly increased with increasing pack weight (DUH, right?) What we did not find however (when controlling for pack weight), was any really meaningful change from the sandal to the lightweight mountaineering boots. There was a small increase with the heavy mountaineering boots.

In other words, more fuel substrate in the working muscle tissue was required by increasing pack weight, and this change was VERY significant. I believe we saw as much as 70% increase in oxygen consumption. Increasing footwear weight did increase O2 consumption with the very heavy mountaineering boot, but not by very much.

Now, there were inherent limitations to the study:

1) Because we only looked at one type of biomechanical activity (walking on an incline), its hard to say that this fully transfers to something as complex and dynamic as ski touring. Further, this may have been a vastly different scenario if you looked at running, because with walking you gain support of the ground reaction force to take literally ALL of the weight of the sandal / shoe / boots during mid step. Running on the other hand puts your feet in the air a lot more, and you’re not gaining that help from the ground reaction forces.

2) We didn’t look at the impact of increasing foot weight to much higher levels (ie. over 1,500 grams per foot).

3) Another study limitation would be sample size. This was 9 years ago, and I believe we had 11 subjects. To gain true statistical power we would need far more participants.

So, what is my take on shoe weight vs. pack weight? I personally believe your statement is incorrect:

Splitboarding and ski touring utilize one VERY important human locomotion technique: The Rest Step!

During each step, as mentioned, you gain the benefit of the ground reaction force supporting literally ALL of the mass in your lower extremity, and therefore you are removing approximately 50% of “time under tension” of your musculoskeletal system to move that mass. With the mass on your back, you are being forced to carry that mass 100% of the time. With it on your feet, less than 50%, and lower, depending on how slow you are going with your rest step.

Again the limitation would be rate of travel to the point of more mass on your feet changing the biomechanics of locomotion, as well as the impact of boot weight beyond 1,500 grams per foot.

I may agree that in elite rando ski racing, it could be different because your feet are spending such less time on the ground PER STEP. But for anything up to a 3mph walk at an incline, I believe your statement is incorrect, based on the Oxygen consumption data I looked at in school.

The last thing I’ll add on this front, is that I personally have found that no matter what the terrain is, I’m ALWAYS faster and using less energy if I’m able to stay in tour mode. Like, if I’m climbing Mt. Rainier, and I get to a section that is firm and steeper, I’m ALWAYS slower and burning more calories if I put my board on my back and start cramponing. I’m also always slower when I’m cramponing VS. skinning. What this means, is that transferring the weight of my splitboard to my back is always more tiring than if I’m able to keep the board on the ground and literally drag it up the hill with my feet.

This is why when Xavier de la Rue is using a solid board for a line, he drags it behind him with a small cord. Its also why you use a sled when hauling loads up Denali. Putting the weight on your back is less efficient.

Your comment on skinning technique:

I also strongly disagree with the idea that your boot and binding choice with make you “pick up your feet with each step”. Those of us who have been climbing mountains for a long time, and who have toured our butts off, absolutely understand the benefit of keeping the ski on the ground. This goes back to what I’m saying about utilizing the ground reaction force. I tour in Karakoram PrimeX bindings, and I absolutely keep my ski on the ground and just drag it forward. So I think your comment should be pointed more towards beginner splitboarders who have not yet figured that technique out.

Anyway, good post dude!