Your first ski trip, from someone who will not make you feel stupid

The problem with asking a ski shop

Ski shops are staffed by people who ski a hundred days a year, and the questions a first-timer needs answered are questions those people stopped asking two decades ago. So you get answers pitched at the wrong level: “you want a shell, not a puffy”, said kindly, by someone who has forgotten that you do not know what a shell is. A shell is a waterproof outer layer with no insulation of its own. Nobody told you, and you did not want to ask twice.

This section exists to answer the questions in the order a family actually hits them, with the jargon explained on first use every single time. There is no assumed knowledge anywhere in it.

What you actually need for one week on snow

For a first trip the list is shorter than the internet suggests. Broken into the three things that decide whether you have a good day:

• Things that keep you warm and dry. A waterproof jacket, a pair of waterproof pants, a base layer against your skin that is not cotton, warm socks that come above the boot cuff, gloves or mittens, and something over your neck. That is the whole clothing list, and it is covered in detail on what to wear skiing.
• Things that protect you. A helmet and goggles. Both are worth owning rather than renting even if you rent everything else, and the reason is in the buy versus rent arithmetic: they are cheap, they last, and rental helmets fit badly because they have been adjusted by two hundred other heads.
• Things you slide on. Skis or a board, boots, and poles. Rent these. There is no version of the first-trip math where buying hardgoods wins, and the boots in particular need to be fitted by someone with their hands on your foot.

What it costs, before anyone sells you anything

The honest headline number for a family of four on a first trip is that gear is not the expensive part. Lift tickets and lodging are. But gear is the part people panic-buy in the two weeks beforehand, and panic-buying is how a family spends $1,200 on clothing that gets worn five days.

The cost page lays out every line item with the buying range and the rental range side by side, and the decision page works out the break-even day count for each category. The short version, which we will keep saying throughout this site: rent the skis, buy the helmet, buy the socks, and think hard about everything in between.

If you are bringing children

Children change the arithmetic more than anything else, in two directions at once. They outgrow gear on a one-to-two-season clock, which pushes hard toward renting. But children’s rental clothing is often not available at all, and children’s helmets in rental fleets tend to be the most worn items in the building.

The other problem is sizing. You cannot size a child’s helmet by their age, and every brand’s chart is slightly different. That is why this site publishes a helmet size chart you can measure a head against rather than a table of ages, plus the same treatment for ski length and boot size.

The order to do this in

If you have a trip booked and four weeks to sort this out, do it in this order. It puts the decisions that take time first and the ones you can make in ten minutes last.

• Four weeks out: decide what you are renting. Read buy versus rent and book rentals if the resort takes reservations, because the good boots go first.
• Three weeks out: measure heads and feet. Order helmets and anything that has to fit, because that is what needs returning and exchanging if it is wrong.
• Two weeks out: layers, gloves, socks and goggles. Read what to wear and buy against the temperature you will actually get.
• The week before: work through the gear checklist and the family packing list. Both are written to be printed.

What this site does and does not do

Everyone in this category says they tested twenty helmets. We have not tested any, and we say so. What we do instead is compile the published specifications, read the safety standards the certifications actually refer to, and work out what each item costs your family per day on snow. The whole method is published, including the arithmetic, so you can re-run it with your own numbers.