It was winter 2020-2021: ski lifts stopped due to Covid and touring ski rental companies stormed every weekend. In Chambéry, you almost had to reserve your pair from one week to the next. On routes near towns, like Chamechaude in Isère or on the classics of Belledonne, Aravis or Bauges, uninterrupted lines sanded the tracks. There was even talk of democratization of the practice, or even of a sustainable alternative to ski lifts.
And since then? The seal skin has not supplanted the chairlift. But “if the Covid madness has subsided a little, we still see that there are a lot of people on the routes”, nuance Alexis Mallon, high mountain guide in Saint-Gervais and professor at ENSA (National School of Skiing and Mountaineering). “I would even say that today, there are more and more skiers who are able to trace things more and more quickly that were done relatively little before. »
500,000 practitioners in France?
What do the numbers say, then? The latest quantified study to date, that of the National Institute of Youth and Popular Education (INJEP), puts the number of regular ski touring practitioners at 0.1% of French people over 15 years old. That’s around 50,000 people. For occasional practitioners, there would be around 500,000 people. According to the FFME (French Mountain and Climbing Federation), this figure would oscillate between 220,000 and 250,000.
So much for those who have overcome the main obstacles to the diffusion of the genre: the entry ticket for the equipment and the technical requirements of the discipline.
Because on the material side, you already have to pay the price. The boards, bindings, shoes and other skins are specific to ski touring, so you can go up and down. To this, it is appropriate, at a minimum, to add safety equipment for operating off the slopes (DVA, shovel, probe). In short, even for the best bargain hunters on second-hand sites, it is difficult to put together the full range for less than 1,000 euros.
