Hi

Being a long suffering user of highly modified Nordicas and Langes, I was interested to come across a brand of boots that claim to be totally customised to your own specs and, if you believe the hype, the most comfortable and best skiing boots of all time. They also look a bit odd, cost more than £500 and seem to only be available from one place in the UK. Seeing as I’m cursed by wierd feet that have never found a comfortable pair of boots, they have certainly caught my interest,

Does anyone know much about them and could you let me know if they live up to the hype? Oh, and 1) does the progressive flex thing work and 2) they reckon they are light enough for touring; true or not?

Many thanks
Mike

PS: I’ve been though all the BS about how this guy or that guy is supposed to be an amazing boot fitter, but frankly most of them have simply caused me to suffer. Best ever technician I’ve come across was a fat old french guy in Meribel with a fag glued to his lip, wouldn’t speak English to me but refused to charge me more than EUR5 and did more for comfort than anyone else…

I’d not heard of Dale Boots, here is the link for anyone interested

http://www.daleboot.com/

They look fantastic.

My own personal feeling is that this kind of process is only worthwhile if you really have problem feet (as you say). I’m not a big fan of boot fitting for normal feet, the inner boot mould enough for the average foot.

There seems to be a trend for bootfitters to go for a “racing fit” even for touring boots and I’ve met a few people who have suffered the dreaded black toe as a result. Obviously if you are touring you don’t want the boot slopping around but if you go for the bootfitter “scrunched toes” fit you are not going to be able to climb or walk. I think this is because those boot fitters have never toured so don’t understand the problems.

There’s Strolz as well in Austria.

You make a good point about the fit of boots, I’ve been on some tours with more than one person who had the bad luck to get kitted out by a store with one of those guys in residence. In the worst case a women who was a novice tourer asked for gear to do some day tours and then go on to the High Route, they sent her out with Endorphins, Fritschi Freeride bindings and some B3’s. We were doing a 5 day tour in the Bernese Oberland and someone 20 odd kg lighter than me was struggling around with double the weight on her feet and they weren’t a good fit either.

You’ve got to buy the idea that with the vast array of boots on offer there isn’t one off the shelf that fits and I don’t buy it for a moment. I really do have a problem with my feet, I need inserts in walking boots and so on, but even in the limited world of touring boots I can easily get boots off the shelf to fit without them being modified apart from getting a longer buckle strap on a pair of endorphins.

You can’t go far wrong with Stockli here, large stores with racks of boots and the staff have a realistic idea about fit.

A person I worked with in the 80’s had a pair that he swore by and refused to replace them until he found a pair that fitted as well, however they fell apart before he could find that elusive fit. He was a competitive mogul skier at the time and I gather the boots were popular amongst American bump skiers.

Daleboots are awesome. They custom make everything out of their SLC factory, if your ever skiing the Wasatch stop by.  I have 2 or 3 friends that have Daleboots, they rave about them as well.  I don’t know if they make anything with a tour/walk mode though.  Excellent quality as well I must say.

I always wondered why Daleboot didn’t suddenly become a massive success story.

I bought a pair in the late 70s and they fitted like velvet gloves for the next 18 years or so and that included two New Zealand ski seasons skiing every day. They were pricey when I bought them and it doesn’t seem that’s changed 30 years later but they were the best skiing investment I ever made. There was if I recall, a lot of buggering around in the beginning with the fitting and getting it just right. I made at least two visits back to the fitter after weekends away testing them as a necessary part of the process.

They ended up after a long hard life so battered with various different clips as repairs ( but still working fine internally) that my mates all used to laugh at them. Mammoth refused to hire me skis saying the boots were incompatible with their insurance policy. It’s fair to say we bonded and I did debate long and hard about actually throwing them away. At one stage I was going to mould them into some sort of transparent acrylic block for use as a doorstop or paper weight or something.

Daleboot have been so low key that for about 15 years, I thought the company had gone out of business. I see from the website the latest models are looking pretty sharp too.
My advice would be to go ahead and check them out with intent. They were a seriously good boot to wear on and off skis and if you’re going to be in the mountains a lot, then it would be a sound and sensible investment.

Sadly, I don’t have a pair now because I stopped skiing for a few years, when I bought new boots I didn’t think I could justify the investment for just one week’s skiing a year. I kinda regret that now cos I’m doing more than that but there you are.

I saw several pairs in a UK ski shop last year. They look quite low key, few embellishments. I do know of someone, who has been to Kitzbuhel for a fitting, and they said they were happy with the service, and the fit.

http://www.kitzbuehel.com/en/a-z/exclusiv-shopping/detail.htm?id=943