Randonnee Binding Development is Retarded
It’s been interesting to watch the development of randonnee bindings these past few years. My recent binding review in Couloir Magazine brushes the surface — I can be a bit more frank on my own website, so here goes: One would think that since the departure from cable bindings about 30 years ago, we’d have bindings as engineered as, say, an iPod. Bindings such as the Dynafit really are backcountry skiing marvels (and almost as small as an iPod), and most people figure out how to get many excellent days out of their randonnee bindings — especially compared to the endless breakage history of telemark bindings.
Nonetheless, considering the cost of randonnee bindings and the resources that have gone into improving the things, they’ve long been in a state of development that could best be termed “retarded.” Over the last decades most rando bindings released for retail sale that still had durability and function issues. Most of those problems have been fixed (or users developed work-arounds), but who knows what lurks on the horizon? No company is immune.
I remember when the first Fritschi Diamirs came to me for testing a number of years ago. On the workbench, I snapped in a boot and the heel unit exploded into high velocity shards. An improved heel was quickly designed and released to the public, but not before a number of people had this somewhat shattering experience (lesson: wear eye protection when testing bindings). Then there was the Dynafit Tristep debacle a few years ago. Renowned for their engineering savvy, the Dynafit boys released a binding that worked fine in alpine mode, but you’d walk out of it in one or two steps while touring. A fix was soon issued, but it never worked 100% and the binding was discontinued. And who can forget the Silvretta SL, which would explode into small parts if you took a forward fall while touring? You needed the skills of a Swiss watch maker to put ‘em together again — if you could find the parts.
We are making progress, but it’s slow.
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