Left: Groomer touring at the beginning of a skimo race. Middle: A double skin rip (#doubleskinrip) executed in mediocre fashion. Right: Attack Turtle descent style performed flawlessly.

Is there a place for race gear in your backcountry quiver?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever found yourself craving the following experiences out of ski touring:

— Redlining while ski-jogging up a resort. Either racing against other people or alone while resort skiers heckle ‘You’re going the wrong way!’

— Transitioning at a blistering pace (ideally performing the legendary double-skin-rip).

— Descending in classic ‘Attack Turtle’ style, praying for the run to finish soon so you can get back to touring uphill.

— Weighing your gear on a scale and making a Gear Weight Spreadsheet (kit measured in grams obviously).

If you raised your hand to any/all of these (and maybe even if you didn’t), you should probably look into skimo racing. Skimo racing is a silly, intense niche of our beloved backcountry skiing community. If the subsets of ski touring were placed on a gradient from uphill to downhill oriented, skimo would slam against the uphill-oriented side of that spectrum. The gear is as light as possible while still managing to ski downhill (Check out ISMF’s shockingly strict and precise rules about gear). The intent behind the sport is to travel as fast as possible both up and down (or train to do so at some other time).

Spectrum of ski touring infographic. Obviously super advanced graphic design.

Jokes and cultural priming aside, this blog post is first and foremost a gear review, but also a commentary on the sport of skimo racing. I reviewed the Dynafit Mezzalama ski, the PDG 2 boot and the Low Tech Race 105 binding (LTR105). This race kit is capable of a solid finish at any North American skimo event. It’s also a quality training kit for resort fitness touring. The combo of Dynafit skis, bindings and boots is designed for the gram-counting, second-shaving, take-racing-seriously community.

But is that all this gear is capable of? Is there more that race gear can offer to the backcountry community, or is it confined to the packed powder of ski areas and flagged off race courses? How dreamy does it sound to log backcountry vert while moving at a skimo race pace…(I have dreams of big alpine enchainments like this, do you?) I reviewed the Dynafit race kit to get a better understanding of ‘skimo’ and test the limits of this uphill-most oriented touring equipment.

This review is broken into two parts: a narrative review of the Mezzalama ski and PDG 2 boot followed by a review of the LTR 105 binding and an epilogue of sorts sharing my lessons learned from taking race gear into the backcountry.