First, safety: your kids cannot rescue you from an avalanche, except maybe if you have older teenagers, so you must be very careful about where you take them. The minimum age I’ve seen online for AIARE Level 1 classes ranges from 10-13, however I don’t feel my 10 year old would be strong enough to dig fast enough to rescue me and I would never want to put that responsibility on her. You know your kids best though, so make the decisions that are best for your family.
For younger kids, see if you can attend an avalanche awareness presentation for kids such as the ones given by the Nikolay Dodov Foundation. These sorts of presentations get the kids to start thinking about where avalanches can occur and what causes them, and the risks of getting caught in one.
Always bring a first aid kit and enough food and warm clothing to be prepared to handle the weather, especially when you’re hiking in tougher terrain such as in snow.
Backcountry touring setup options: (I have very small feet – 22.5 boots – so finding gear that fits small feet has been a battle for me since I started backcountry skiing)
- The Contour Startup Ski Touring Adapter fits into your binding and gives you a releasable heel.
- It works with boot sole lengths from 245-305mm, which means the smallest boot size is about 21.5
- For our family with small feet, this means that it didn’t fit our kids until our daughter was 10.
- For skins, you can trim an old pair of adult skins to fit the kid’s skis.
- Jones Snowboards makes a splitboard for kids, but the only size available is for bigger kids.
- Telemark (although boot size limitations seem to be similar to tech bindings so don’t work for smaller kids).
Non-skiing/boarding options:
- Snowshoes – kids skis are small so you can fit them in your pack
- Bootpacking – KidProject.org recommends putting Yaktraks and micro-spikes on the kids boots to prevent slipping
DIY options:
- From a comment on KidProject.org: try putting cross country boots on straight skis with skins attached to the skis to get your kid uphill and carry their downhill skis.
- DIY kids splitboard setup
- Telemark
- Modify an adult binding to fit a kids size boot.
How to start:
- First, get your kids to enjoy skiing or boarding in the trees and get them to a point where you feel they are doing it very safely.
- Next, try side-country gates or boot-packs at the resorts – get them to enjoy the benefits of putting some energy in to getting fresh tracks.
- Finally, look for some very safe hills to play around on.
- Use the opportunity to look at your local avalanche website with your child and discuss the risks.
- Make sure to focus on enjoying the hike, because it will take up most of the time. Check out our page on keeping kids entertained while hiking.
- Also make sure the kids put on and take off layers appropriately while hiking and switching to going downhill – those skills are not instinctive and you don’t want to end up with a hypothermic kid.
- Turn around if the avalanche danger looks higher than you expected, and talk about it with your kids. That might be the most valuable lesson for the trip.
As I mentioned, we currently don’t have much personal experience backcountry skiing with kids. Here are some of the other helpful links I have found on backcountry skiing with kids:
- KidProject.org: one of their kids even competes in SkiMo.
- DadDispatches.com
- YukonBackcountrySkiing.com
