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Wellness Wednesday for November 1, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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These are indeed what I would call ski mountaineering boots, and they are a terrible choice for flatland travel -- they are nice enough boots, but they are designed to do two things well:

  • ski up steep skin tracks
  • provide near-alpine gear downhill performance with the heels locked

They will absolutely suck for breaking trail in the woods.

You are right that skis can be faster than snowshoes in some conditions; just that 'cold dry interior forest' is not one of those conditions -- you won't be able to stay on the surface and do anything like gliding unless you luck into a melt-crust or something, you will be shuffling at roughly snowshoe pace anyways. (and your rigid boots would make this hellish, especially since they don't fit)

If you are serious about using skis for this I would not worry about your feet being cold -- you will be working hard enough that it won't be a problem, regular touring boots would be fine. You probably want to not carry extra boots for when you aren't skiing though, so something like this would be great: https://www.baffin.com/products/3pinm003

I actually do something along these lines in the winter (not in Alaska) -- I've taken gear tips from this forum in the past: https://telemarktalk.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3112

That link is an interesting thread, with some actual Alaskans involved -- I do use something like the NATO skis mentioned for breaking trail around my place -- which is worth it if you are planning to revisit the trail. Otherwise unless there are significant downhill parts on your route, the snowshoes will be faster and more energy efficient. Also some interesting input from a Finnish dude -- I think you will not be able to find his 300cm 'forest skis' on ebay though. (and I'd think their utility would depend a lot on the density of the forest in question)