After shovelling out for a few hours, Marian and I came in for some lunch and then tackled a few more projects related to gear prep for my Mount Logan trip. My new Intuition Liners had arrived and it was time to mould them to my feet. It involves a process of microwaving rice in a nylon stocking (a homemade magic bag of sorts) to heat up the foam-stuffing my feet into them to form, and then waiting for 8 minutes to pass when I could take my very warm feet out. With new liners all set, we turned our attention to my climbing skins.

Climbing skins allow you to climb hills and pull sleds much more easily. They are held to the bottom of the ski with special (and magic) glue that lets the skins stick to the ski base but also be taken off (for downhill fun). The skins have to be cut to the exact dimensions of my skis but fortunately the supplied G3 skin cutter makes the job very easy. G3 skins are made in Canada and I love that I’ll have a maple leaf going along with me on Mount Logan. The blue/red graphics on the skins add to my collection of primary colours for the trip (boots = blue & yellow, skis = green ).

I last used skins on my ski expedition to climb Greenland’s Highest Peak, Gunnbjörn Feld We skied 330 km across the ice cap to reach the peak and climb it. We used half skins for most of the trip and then switched to full skins for the climb of the peak (since the slope was steeper). Skins allow the ski to glide forward but the nape on the fabric keeps you from slipping back it would be nearly impossible to pull a sled without skins or waxes bases. It’s great to be putting some of my polar skills to use once again. Now all that’s left to do is take the new liners and the new skins out for a test ski and test climb to see if any further modifications are required. With today’s dump of 30 or 40 cm of snow, that should now be possible to do!