Its a Good Thing When Your Ski Leashes Do This:

Leash failure - at some point, I want my leashes to break.

Ski leashes save weight by eliminating brakes, but they also turn one's boards into two 1.75-meter torture devices that will beat their rider to pieces in a big fall.  Anyone else remember the ski straps back in the day before brakes?  It feels just like that.  In the backcountry, a ski leash will also turn your skis into big anchors if you ever get caught in a slide, dragging you down when all you can hope for is to end up on top.

A solution?  I make sure one component of my leashes - the clips - will fail at a certain load.  They're strong enough to hold the skis, but weak enough to blow apart.  This means I might loose my ski in a big fall, and I will loose my ski if I'm caught in a slide, but that's a small price to pay when weighed against the trauma they could cause by being still attached to me.

In past year's I've salvaged clips from old telemark leashes, but I've run out and had to look for alternatives.  This year I'm experiementing with S-Biners from NiteIze Innovation.  I first tried out the #0, but they proved to be too small to work with gloves.  I've settled on the #2 - big enough for gloved fingers, light enough to not notice, and rated to 10lbs.  That's plenty strong enough for my boards.  They cost $1.59 from my local hardware store.

So that photo above?  That's what happened on the 30th, after a day of great powder with four teenage rippers, making the upteenth turn down Art's Knob at Mach 1.  My tips suddenly plowed into a hidden compression, launching me into a double tomahawk.  My right ski stayed on, but the left was launched and released.  Exactly what I wanted.