Garmont Cosmos Ski Boot — Light, Stiff and Swift
Lou testing Cosmos, May 2012, Colorado. Click most images to enlarge.
Garmont Cosmos backcountry skiing & ski mountaineering boot.
With atomic bomb force, the backcountry skiing boot market has exploded with variety that even my fertile gear-fantasy brain never imagined a decade ago. Joining the chain reaction, Garmont is introducing for 2012/13 their Powerlite series. This review focuses on the Cosmos. All Powerlite boots have similar features to Cosmos with variations in buckle number, plastic compounds, and so forth.
- Cosmos 4 buckle (men) (all Grilamid plastic, Garmont rated stiffness 125)
- Celeste 4 buckle (women) (all Grilamid plastic, Garmont rated stiffness 120)
- Orbit 3 buckle (men) (Grilamid lower shoe, Garmont rated stiffness 115)
- Nova 3 buckle (women) (Grilamid lower shoe, Garmont rated stiffness 110)
Overall, Cosmos is positioned as a fairly beefy boot that still has the cuff articulation and lack of weight for effective human powered vert.
Weight
Pick up the Cosmos, you’ll think it’s lost mass through some miraculous process involving cosmogentic nuclides. Thankfully, no radioactivity is involved. Instead, Garmont built every major shell component with Grilamid, that difficult to mold but beautiful plastic that’s now the go-to material for making light yet stiff ski boots.
My 28.5 (BSL 316) test shells without power strap weigh 41.4 ounces each (1174 grams). That is LIGHT, compare to other boots in our weight chart. The next shell size down, what they call the 27.5 (BSL 306 mm) is 41.4 ounces (1174 grams) !! Read more backcountry skiing
Latest BCA Shovels — Best Yet
Backcountry Access B Series avalanche rescue shovels, B-1 to left, B-2 to right. Sunglasses for scale.
Ah, the lowly and sometimes lovely avalanche rescue shovel. Extra weight 99.9 percent of the time for most skiers. Then, the .1 percentile occurs and it is hopefully love at first sight.
No clear nor industry-wide standard is in use for avalanche rescue shovels. Instead, the person who does the most visible test and has the strongest opinion seems to rule the design process. Recent industry trend is for much stronger shovels due to the Austrian Alpine Club Genswein Test of a few years ago. In my opinion some of that test was misguided (as in worrying if a shovel can be stomped on hard enough to decapitate a person), but it did inspire an industry-wide improvement in shovels that continues to this day. Read more backcountry skiing
First Time On The Haute Route, Part 2
Robert Suminsby
(Editor’s note: The concluding trip report for those of you who have never done a European hut trip. Part one is here.)
Day 4: Arolla to Bertol Hut
Sunrise above Arolla
In describing day four of our route back in Chamonix, a British guide had confessed, “Well, it’s rubbish, really….no skiing, just uphill all day long.” Uphill, indeed. With the town of Arolla nestled deep in the valley at 2000m, it would be a long climb to the Bertol Hut at 3311m. But despite the lack of turns, it proved to be an enjoyable day. Starting out in the shady glacier-carved valley at about 7:30am, it took an hour before the sun finally peeked over the horizon, a welcome sight. Read more backcountry skiing
TR — Independence Pass, Colorado, Yesterday
Local beta for those who asked: We did four laps in Mountain Boy basin, skied from about 7:00 am to around noon. We were amazed at how the snow surface and density held up. Not sure that’ll happen once things warm up more, but that’s the way it was May 15, 2012.
Bob Perlmutter in Mountain Boy, Independence Pass, Colorado. Illustrating news of our local snow conditions. Click to enlarge.
First Time On The Haute Route, Part 1
Robert Suminsby
(Editor’s note: This trip report came in a few days ago and we liked the story for those of you who have never done a European hut trip — so here you go.)
Skinning up the Col des Roux
There I was: four days into a five-day ski tour of the famous Haute Route linking Chamonix and Zermatt. Relaxing in the octagon dining area of the spectacular Bertol Hut, I spent a few minutes thumbing through the Hüttenbuch (the hut’s visitor log), mystified that so few Americans had marked their passage through this amazing spot. Plenty of Swiss, of course, and ample numbers of French, German, and assorted other Euro-types, but the letters “USA” were in short supply. (Colorado, it must be said, had the lion’s share of the few American entries I found.)
With the explosion of interest in backcountry skiing, why had so few of my countrymen made the journey to one of the most famous huts in the Alps? Yes, we have plenty of terrain to explore in the US, and getting oneself and a big pile of gear to the other side of an ocean is a daunting prospect. Still, this is the Alps: the birthplace of alpinism, the ancestral home of ski touring. Surely, there must be lots of Americans dreaming of these distant mountains?
View of Chamonix and Mont Blanc from Les Grand Montets (click all images to enlarge)
Or maybe not. It occurred to me that perhaps the Haute Route isn’t as well known back home as it is here in Europe. Or worse, Americans may have heard of it but written it off as too much of a logistical hassle, a mysterious Holy Grail of ski touring that would remain forever out of reach.
If all that describes you, then don’t despair. Read on. Read more backcountry skiing
Bears, Huts and Glaciers at Rogers Pass
A while back, Friends of Revelstoke and Glacier emailed me about the nice guidebook and winter version map that’s available for this famous ski touring area. They sent along the items, and they’ve since sat on my desk tempting me like a large chocolate bar after a 24 hour fast (is that how long it’s been since I was skiing the last time?).
Rogers Pass map and book.
The book, “Ski Touring in Rogers Pass” by Eric Dafoe and John Kelly was revised in 2010, and packs quite a wallop in its small 5×7 inch footprint. The route graphics are photo based, so the companion map is essential. I gave the cartographic a good look see, and noticed Dawson glacier. Then I noticed nearby Glacier Circle hut. I thought, I wonder what the pastries are like up there? Should we go?
Then I read the website hut description: “… approach is via a 2 – 3 day hike up the Beaver Valley and into Glacier Circle. This approach is mostly forested and leads through excellent bear habitat.
Role reversal?
Book and map available at the Friends of Rogers Pass website.
