This polemic is quite amusing. Not to be taken too seriously:
So you’ve been infected by the brainwashing on the ski forums and you’ve decided you’ve got to get into backcountry ski touring, aka freerando. Difficult to step back from the epidemic that infects the inner hipster, isn’t it? It’s good timing as you’ve run out of crap to buy with your credit card.
You want to do things right. You treat yourself to a pair of butt-ugly Cham 107s at 800 bucks, some freerando carbon boots, its for the shin spitting flex of 160, another $600, Kingtech Animal bindings, $500 per pound, a body finder, $400, some Vera-Lynns, $200 and some kind of water wings to stick on your back which the guy in the shop told you would stop avalanches.
Put bluntly you’ve been really spoilt by all the ski companies that see freerando as the future. (It was the same 15 years ago with snowboarding, believe me) and want you to believe that a moveable boot cuff and releasable touring bindings are fantastic innovations even if they existed 30 years ago.
So your are kitted out in 100% Merions underwear and you want nothing more than to hear the singing of birds in the trees and to enjoy the sunshine. You repeat what you want to believe: “ski resorts have become hell on earth”. You want to “get back to nature” and “real skiing” and to “lose yourself, to find yourself”.
You think you are a special kind of cool but don’t worry, we know the story, the truth: whatever you do, you are bullshitter, you’ll never get up with the cock to climb 3 hours in the shade and biting cold for a run that lasts 10 seconds on some old crusty rotten mank. 9 times out of 10 you’ll end up in the tracks of a CAF group from Lyon about as friendly as a Crystal Meth baron in Federal prison. The sort of guy who will slit your throat if your smartphone rings in the middle of the immaculate silence.
And seeing as you don’t do much sport and you spend the other 51 weeks of the year posting on ski forums you are going suffer like a dead rat and throw up your energy bars even before you get to the summit.
Hey but don’t worry, we’re not stupid, we know too well that the only thing that matters to you is not the sporting achievement, not to challenge yourself or even the immersion in the environment but to film yourself at the top with your GoPro from a selfie pole with a couple of mates surrounded by peaks for which you’ve just invented the names. All this to upload in real time to Instagran with the aim of impressing the bird you were trying to pick up last Friday. #nature #detox #sweat #calm #beauty #free #pure #shutup
Today you tell everyone that the next time you’ll ski in resort has not been born but we know too well that after a couple of years, when you have 5 ski tours in your records, your Techpins are gathering rust and the cheat sheets have fused with your skins you will try and sell your gear for the price you paid for it.
You’ve understood, a bit late maybe, that behind all the marketing bullshit, worries about the environment etc that it was all about making money for the Jonny come lately firms that are entering into this “new” sport. You, you who naively believed that for each box that arrived through the post from SportKonran, EkoBizz etc. they were planting a tree to offset your carbon footprint.
But by now you’ve found something new: fixies, trail, aquabike, urban golf; to talk about around the water cooler at your job in some nameless business park.
Losers!
"When man no longer has room for nature, maybe nature will no longer have room for mankind" - Stefan Edberg.
Adapted from http://www.dailyfreeski.com/2015/01/vive-la-fric-rando.html