World Ski Touring Guide: Book Review
The best guidebooks are like really good party invitations – they offer just enough detail to entice you to show up at the right time and place while maintaining enough mystery to allow for a true adventure when you arrive.Too few details and a guidebook will lack either intrigue or utility, or both. Too many details and a guidebook becomes tedious, eliminating the possibility of serendipity.
The World Ski Touring Guide strikes the just right balance between utility and adventure. Published by the France-based Ski Rando Magazine, the 308-page book includes ski touring routes in 40 different countries, including 84 mountain ranges on 6 continents. The book is written in both English and French, offering the full text (side-by-side) in both languages.
It’s an invitation to literally an entire world of skiing.
However, imagine being invited to fifty different parties – you’re likely to end up in a pretty wide variety of locations depending upon whose parties you attend. Over fifty people contributed to the World Ski Touring Guide and this diversity of perspective is reflected in the variety of routes that are highlighted in the guide. For example, the selected routes for Iceland highlight steep couloir skiing while overlooking numerous, more moderate touring options nearby. This isn’t a drawback of the book in my opinion – rather, the limited, highly selective information serves to preserve the mystery of exploration.
Exploring moderate terrain in Iceland. Brent Doscher photo.The book is organised by continent and country. The layout for each country includes an overview of Where To Ski? alongside information categories such as: Getting There & Getting Around; When To Go; Weather; Accommodation; Budget; Paperwork; and Maps And Information. Each suggested route includes information on the maximum altitude, elevation gained/lost, a difficulty grade (divided into descent and exposure ratings), as well as a “star” rating from 1 to 3 stars. Numerous routes, but not all, include terrain photos with an approximate route indicated with a red line on the photo.
The World Ski Touring Guide invites you to dream of ski adventures near and far. Sylvio Egea, Editor of Ski Rando Magazine writes in the introduction of the book,
Why cover such vast distances just to make a few curves in the powder, which you could do at home anyway? If you’re asking yourself this question then you’ve clearly never gone travelling, or perhaps just not in the right way. Skiing is just a pretext to discover new places and cultures, to share unique moments with locals, to discover new perspectives and to learn to adapt – basically, to set off on an adventure!
SPECS:
Publisher: Ski Rando Magazine
Where to buy: Direct from the publisher or, in online the United States,
Price: 29 Euro or $47 USD (plus shipping)
Jerry Isaak is an Associate Teaching Professor and the program lead for ski touring in the Adventure Studies Department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. He is an AMGA certified Ski Guide and has guided backcountry ski adventures in Iceland, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, and throughout the United States and western Canada.