Losing a ski in powder snow sucks. Here’s a few tips on how to find a ski in powder and stopping it from happening in the first place.
Preventative measures:
- Learn how to ski powder. If you are from Australia or Scotland and doing a rookie season in say Canada or Japan, you’re probably pretty inexperienced at powder skiing, and coming out of your bindings a lot. Take a formal lesson or learn from your more experienced friends, so you ski more and fall less.
- Tape up. Attach 2m of high viz marking tape to your bindings and shove it up your ski pant legs. When you do pop out of your bindings, the ski may not be lost in the first place.
- GPS tiles on your skis. This method has mixed results from brilliant to useless.
So you’ve lost your ski. What next? This method has worked for me.
- Stay calm, you’re going to have to work methodically. Searching for a lost ski can be exhausting so you don’t want to waste energy retracing your steps. I’ve found skis over 50m downhill of the fall spot in steep dry powder.
- Remember: the following will determine how far the ski has travelled: how fast you were skiing, the steepness of the slope, and the lightness of the powder. If the powder is a bit crudey the ski can bounce off its original line. A Detroit doctor friend says it’s like a bullet going through a body. It doesn’t go straight, it bounces off organs and bone.
- Take off your other ski. You’ll be using it to sweep through the snow hoping to hit the lost ski.
- If you are skiing with other people, they will need to help. There are friends on a powder day and you don’t want to be the guy who doesn’t help and then loses a ski later on.
- Use your poles (or your friends ski) to set up markers showing where you fell and which direction your skis were pointing when you fell. The markers will indicate the most likely zone the lost ski is in.
- Work methodically. Start sweeping across the fall line at the fall point. Long ski sweeps mean you should be able to sweep a 2m by 1m box.
- If you don’t find the ski move across the slope and do another 2m by 1m box. A friend will double the size of the box.
- If you don’t find the ski take a few steps downhill and repeat. I like to sweep above me as it’s less stress on the back and you get a deeper sweep in. Sometimes you’ll tread on the ski!!
- If you have a big group of people searching, you can start tight at the fall point and then fan out lower down the hill. Just make sure there are no gaps in your sweeping.
- Find the ski, hike back up and get your marker poles, ski hard the rest of the day, and buy apres beers for those who helped.
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