Why You Need To Buy New Boots This Season

The one piece of gear most skiers are loath to replace is also the most important: ski boots.

Before we break your heart and tell you to turn your beloved boots into flowerpots or birdhouses, we admit that we understand your plight. Finding the right boot and getting all the necessary fitting done to make it perfect is expensive and time consuming, making it difficult to let them go. This is why ski forums are full of loving odes about how their Raichle Flexons are still ripping—and that boot hasn’t been made since 1999.

We loved them, too. 

We admire your loyalty, but good lord, it is time to move on. The plastic in ski boots has a shelf life of around 200 days on the hill or five years, whichever comes first, and your liners have a shelf life of less than half that.

“But I want to spend money on new skis instead,” you may whine while stroking your ancient relics that probably smell like wet hockey gloves. Hear us now and thank us later: No new ski—even if it’s a sexy Wagner Custom—will matter if you’re sloshing around in mush buckets that have lost their ability to transfer power. New boots are like a young person’s joints: elastic, supple, and able to recover immediately from whatever it is you put them through.

“It’s like having the right tires to drive on the snow,” said Mark Elling, bootfitter at Mt. Bachelor’s Gravity Sports, curriculum director of Masterfit University (MFU) and staff manager of the MFU bootfitting workshops. (He’s also a former board-certified pedorthist, an author on ski technique, and level III PSIA Alpine Instructor.) “Your own ski boots are at that level of importance. Your life depends on them, ultimately, because that’s what controls your skis.”

Mark Elling, curriculum director of Masterfit University (MFU)

So how do you know if your boots or liners need replacing, other than the aforementioned timeframes? With boots, if the plastic has shown any signs of discoloration, i.e. white spots turning yellow or a general dullness to the once shiny sheen, they are, to use a technical term, dunzo. Also look for cracks in the shell, and inspect your lugs for wear and tear. If the lugs are rounded from clomping through parking lots and the mountain village cobblestones, they’re no longer safe in your binding, and you may find yourself in a predicament that is much more expensive than new boots, depending on your health insurance deductible.

As for your liners, if your boots finally feel “comfortable,” that’s a big red flag. Ski boots are meant to feel like a good handshake—snug enough to offer relief when you wrestle yourself out of them at the end of the day. If you feel like you’re not able to communicate properly with your skis, it means your input is being lost in empty spaces that used to be occupied by your liner. Visible signs of wear and tear matter, too, as does that wet hockey-glove smell… Lucky for you, there are plenty of replacement liners available in both stock and aftermarket brands like Intuition, Zipfit, and Palau. (Stock liners these days are pretty damn good, and if you can find the pair that match your boots exactly—boot brands sell them on their website—that can be a great option.)

A new pair of liners can extend the life of your boots.

Your boots are the most important piece of ski gear you own. (Trustworthy advice coming from a ski brand that does not sell them.) They are what transmits your energy into your skis. They are your connection to the snow, the mountain, and, ultimately, to the reason why we ski—joy and happiness. In our book, that’s worth every penny.

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Article by Kimberly Beekman

Kimberly Beekman is the former editor-in-chief of the late, great Skiing Magazine (RIP), and a longtime editor of SKI Magazine before that. She currently uses the title of “freelancer” as a beard to ski powder all over the world. She lives in Steamboat, Colorado, with her wonderful daughter and terrible cat.