Women's winter boots, compared on published temperature ratings

The boots you wear most

On a week-long ski trip you will spend perhaps five hours a day in ski boots and most of the rest of the time in these. Walking to the lift, standing in a lift line with a child, crossing an icy parking lot, walking to dinner - the winter boot does more hours than any other item in the bag.

It is also the item most often left to chance, on the reasoning that any boot will do for walking. Any boot will do until the parking lot is a sheet of ice or the snow at the curb is deeper than the boot is tall. The winter boots guide covers the general case; this page is about three specific pairs.

What a temperature rating is and is not

A published rating like -40F is a claim about the insulation package, usually derived from a standard test with a stationary or slowly moving foot. It is not a promise that your feet will be warm at -40F for an afternoon.

What actually decides whether your feet are warm is a combination of the rating, how dry the boot is, how tight it is laced and how much you are moving. A correctly rated boot laced too tight on a stationary foot gets cold well above its number.

So use the rating as a comparison between boots rather than as a forecast. All three here publish the same figure, which is convenient: it means the decision is made on the other specifications.

The three, compared

Three rows differ meaningfully: the upper material, the liner, and the weight. Those three are the whole decision.

The picks

Kamik Momentum 3

The pick for most trips, and the cheapest of the three. A seam-sealed 600-denier nylon upper over a waterproof rubber base, a 145 g HeatMX liner, a published -40F rating and a self-cleaning tread pattern - which matters more than it sounds, because a tread that packs with snow is a tread with no grip at all.

Nylon is the right upper for a boot that will get wet daily. It does not need treating the way suede and leather do, it dries faster, and it is the reason this is the cheapest pair here. It also scuffs where leather does not, which is a cosmetic objection rather than a functional one.

Seven published sizes, US 5 to 11, and a published one-year warranty. The fixed liner is the honest limitation: a wet boot has to dry as a whole, which takes longer than drying a liner and a shell separately.

Kamik Snovalley 6

The same 145 g HeatMX liner and the same -40F rating as the Momentum, behind a seam-sealed waterproof embossed suede upper with a faux-shearling cuff. Kamik publishes 2.61 lb a pair and a 10.62 in boot height, so it sits between the Momentum and the Alborg on weight and clears deeper snow than an ankle boot does.

The reason to choose it over the Momentum is that it looks like a boot you would wear to dinner rather than a boot you would wear to shovel a driveway. That is a legitimate reason on a trip where you are packing one pair - but it is the more expensive of the two fixed-liner boots here at a published $139.99, and it is the heavier of them, so you are paying for the look rather than the specification.

The reason not to is the suede. It marks, and it wants treating before the first wet day and periodically afterwards - which is a maintenance task the nylon pair does not have. The mid-season checkup page covers the kind of maintenance that gets forgotten.

Kamik Alborg

Marked as the skip above and it is the most capable boot on this page. The reason is one published feature: an 8 mm Zylex removable liner.

A removable liner changes the overnight problem entirely. Pull the liner out and both it and the shell dry from the inside overnight; leave a fixed-liner boot to dry and the inside is still damp in the morning. The overnight drying page covers how to do it without wrecking anything, and a boot dryer solves the same problem electrically. A removable liner is also replaceable, which extends the useful life of the boot beyond the liner packing out.

The cost is weight: 3.81 lb a pair, well over a pound more than the Snovalley and more than a pound and a half more than the Momentum. That is a genuinely heavy boot to walk a village in, and it is why this is the skip rather than the pick for a typical trip. Six published sizes, starting at 6 rather than 5.

Fitting a winter boot

• Fit them with the sock you will wear. Which for a winter boot is usually a midweight wool sock, not the thin sock you would put in a ski boot. The socks page explains why the two are different problems.
• Leave room to wiggle your toes. Unlike a ski boot, a winter boot insulates using trapped air, and a tight boot has no trapped air. Tight equals cold here, which is the opposite of ski boot fitting.
• Check the height against what you walk through. A mid-height boot is fine for a cleared sidewalk and useless at a curb with a plow bank on it.
• Look at the tread, not just the rating. Winter boot soles vary enormously on ice, and no maker publishes a grip figure. Slip-on traction devices cover the gap for a few dollars.

The rest of the family

The same reasoning applies to everyone in the household, and for children it applies harder because a cold or wet child ends the outing. The kids snow boot roundup covers two boots with published ratings.

And if the boots are for snowshoeing rather than walking, check the snowshoe’s published footwear range against them first - a snowshoe binding fits around a boot, so the boot decides what will work.