How to choose touring skins

Climbing skins are strips of directional plush that grip the snow when your ski slides back and glide when it slides forward, and they get less attention than any other piece of touring gear despite deciding most of how the day uphill feels. Three calls to make: what the plush is made of, how the skin attaches and fits your ski, and what holds it to the base.

Mohair, nylon, or the mix

The plush is either mohair, nylon, or a blend, and the material sets the grip-to-glide tradeoff before anything else does. Mohair, from Angora goat hair, glides noticeably better, weighs less, and packs smaller. It also wears faster and grips a little less on firm, icy skin tracks. Nylon is the opposite on every axis: strong grip, close to indestructible, heavier, and it drags on every stride. The blends, typically 65 or 70 percent mohair to 30 or 35 nylon, exist because the extremes suit almost nobody.

• 100% mohair: racers and fitness tourers who count grams and accept the wear.
• Mix: the default. Most of mohair's glide, most of nylon's bite and lifespan.
• 100% nylon: budget setups, rental fleets, and anyone who values durability over stride.

Glide sounds like a luxury until you count it. On a 1,000 m day you take thousands of strides, and a small drag on each one is the difference between arriving fresh and arriving cooked. Buy the mix unless you have a specific reason not to.

Attachment, fit, and trim

A skin holds the ski at two points: a loop or clip over the tip and a tensioned strap on the tail. Tail attachment matters more than it looks. A skin that sheds its tail on an icy sidehill turns a skin track into a wrestling match, so favor systems with a proper cam or hook and real tension adjustment. Some race skins skip the tail entirely to save weight; leave those to racers.

Width should cover the base wall to wall at the widest point, minus the edges. Buy the size that covers your ski's widest measurement, then trim: the cutter supplied with the skin offsets the cut so 2 to 3 mm of steel edge stays exposed on each side. Those exposed edges are what hold you on a firm traverse, so do not chase full coverage past them. Trimming takes fifteen careful minutes. Do it at home, not in the parking lot.

Glue or glueless

Standard skins use hot-melt glue, and it works: reliable stick, cold tolerance, a known quantity. The cost is care. Glue-to-glue folding, drying before storage, keeping the adhesive off skin bags and gloves, and a re-glue after a few seasons of hard use. Glueless and hybrid-adhesion skins use a silicone-like layer instead. They pull apart without a fight, tolerate careless handling, and never leave residue on your base. Where they lag is the hard cases: very cold days and repeated wet transitions, where traditional glue still holds an advantage. If you tour a few times a month in normal conditions, glueless is a real option now. If you do big traverses in the cold, glue remains the safe call.

Grip gets you up the last steep switchback. Glide gets you through the other four hours.

Live from the brands' own stores. For the full shelf, the touring skins wall has every skin that fits, with prices as the makers set them today.