Storing ski gear for the summer, in about twenty minutes

Eight months is the longest part of the season

Gear spends roughly five days a year on snow and about two hundred and forty days in a cupboard. Almost every problem people blame on cheap equipment happened during the second number: rusted edges, a base gone chalky white, goggle foam separated from the frame, a helmet liner that smells, boot liners packed into a shape that is no longer your foot.

None of it is expensive to prevent. The list below is the whole job, in the order that stops you doing anything twice.

Skis and boards: storage wax, and nothing else matters as much

This is the one job on the page that genuinely needs doing and genuinely gets skipped. Iron a thick coat of wax over the base and over the edges, and leave it unscraped. The wax seals the base against drying out and seals the steel against a humid summer. In the autumn you scrape and brush it off and the skis come out in the condition they went in.

Skip it, and two things happen. The base dries and goes chalky white at the edges, which is the p-tex losing the wax it had absorbed, and the edges develop surface rust that has to be stoned off. Neither is fatal, both are annoying, and a $109.99 kit that you already own makes the job fifteen minutes. The tune-kit comparison is here including the break-even math for whether owning one makes sense at all. If it does not, a shop will do a storage wax for you as a standalone service.

• Clean and dry the base first. Wax over grit traps the grit.
• Do not use ski straps over a waxed base for months. Strap them at the tips and tails, not across the middle.
• Store them standing or flat, not leaning against one edge. A ski left leaning on one edge on a concrete floor for eight months picks up moisture exactly where you least want it.
• Leave bindings at their normal setting. Backing off DIN for storage is an old habit from a different era of bindings and it does nothing useful; more importantly, a setting that gets changed is a setting that has to be re-set by a shop before you ski.

Boots: buckled, dry, liners in

A ski boot shell is molded plastic that remembers its shape. Left splayed open all summer, the cuff and the instep relax outward and the boot fits worse in December. Buckle them loosely closed, on the lowest tension that holds the shape rather than clamped tight.

Put the liners back in, but only once they are genuinely dry all the way through — that is the whole point of drying properly on the last day. A liner stored damp inside a closed shell for eight months is how boots develop a smell that never leaves, and it is the single most common storage mistake. If the last day was wet and you are packing the car, a dryer earns its keep here more than at any other point in the season.

Boot bags are for transport, not storage. Store the boots on a shelf where you can see them, and store them somewhere that does not freeze: cold cycling embrittles plastic over years.

Goggles: out of the soft bag, into something rigid

The soft microfiber bag a goggle ships in is a lens cloth with a drawstring. It will not stop a boot, a helmet or a pole from crushing the frame, and a crushed goggle frame does not spring back. Store goggles in a hard case, or in the box they came in, with nothing on top of them.

• Bone dry before they go away. Moisture trapped against face foam over a summer grows mold in the foam, which cannot be cleaned out.
• Never wipe the inside lens. True in season and true in storage: the anti-fog coating is a surface treatment and a cloth removes it permanently. This is the single most common way people ruin a goggle.
• Keep them out of sunlight. UV degrades frame plastics and face foam over time, which is why a goggle left on a car parcel shelf all summer comes back brittle.

Helmets: the storage rules are also the safety rules

A helmet is EPS foam in a shell, and the two things that degrade it are heat and solvents. Do not store one in a car, do not store one in an attic, and do not clean one with anything but mild soap and water. Remove the comfort liner and the ear pads if they are removable, wash them per the maker instructions, and let them dry fully before reassembling.

Summer is also the right time to make the replacement decision honestly rather than in a rush the night before a trip. The helmet care and replacement page covers what an impact actually does to the foam and which makers publish a crash replacement route.

Outerwear: wash it before it goes away, not after

Counterintuitive and important. A jacket stored dirty spends eight months with body oils and sunscreen soaking into the face fabric, and those are exactly what kill the water-repellent finish. Wash outerwear at the end of the season, dry it, and store it on hangers rather than compressed in a bin: prolonged compression flattens insulation and creases membranes.

Merino base layers and socks want to be clean and completely dry before storage, for a more mundane reason: moths are drawn to the residue on dirty wool, not to the wool itself. The full washing guide covers the detergent question, which is the part most people get wrong.

Where to store it, and the three places not to

The October reversal

1. Scrape and brush the storage wax off the bases and edges.
2. Check edges for rust and stone off anything you find.
3. Book the shop visit now, not in December. A binding check before the first trip is the one appointment worth making early.
4. Try every child’s boot and helmet on before you assume last year’s gear fits. Growth is the whole problem with kids gear and October is when you want to find out, not the night before.