Spring skiing: what to change in what you wear

What is actually different about spring

Three things, and each one changes what you wear.

• The snow is wet. It melts in the sun and refreezes overnight, so you get hard ice at nine and heavy slush by two. Wet snow means water rather than powder, and water goes through fabric that powder never troubled.
• The temperature swing is enormous. A frozen morning and a shirtsleeves afternoon in the same day is normal, and the clothing that suits the first is wrong for the second.
• The sun is at its most intense. Higher in the sky than midwinter, reflecting off snow, at altitude. April is when people come home with the worst burns of the year.

The season that tests your outerwear

Powder is frozen water that brushes off. Slush is water. That single difference is why a jacket that performed fine all winter can soak through in April, and why spring is the season where the published specifications on the waterproof ratings page stop being academic.

The Arctix pants in this ledger publish 3,000 mm and are explicit that it is a coating rather than a membrane and that only critical seams are sealed. That is a fair description and it is exactly the specification that struggles in wet snow. The Wantdo jacket publishes 10,000 mm and names a microporous membrane, which is a genuine spring figure.

The layering change

Winter layering is base, mid, shell, all worn all day. Spring layering is the same three pieces used differently: you will be taking the mid layer off and putting it back on, possibly twice.

• Swap an insulated jacket for a shell if you have one. An insulated jacket has no low setting. A shell plus a removable mid layer does. This is the season a 3-in-1 jacket earns its keep, because the liner comes out.
• Drop to a lighter mid layer. A 100-weight fleece rather than a 200. The mid-layer page has the weights.
• Keep the base layer. Do not ski in a cotton t-shirt because it is warm. Spring is when you sweat most, and a wet cotton layer at two in the afternoon is the same problem it always was.
• Use the pit zips. The feature people never open is the one that makes a jacket work across a 30-degree day. The jacket features page ranks them highly.
• Carry the layer you took off. Which is one of the few genuine reasons to wear a small pack at a resort.

Gloves and hands in spring

Counterintuitively, spring is hard on hands. Wet snow soaks gloves far faster than powder does, and a soaked glove on a cold morning chairlift is colder than a dry glove in midwinter. The fix is not warmer gloves, it is a spare dry pair - the same advice as the glove sizing page gives for children, applied to adults in April.

A lighter spring glove for the afternoon and a warmer pair for the morning is the setup people who ski a lot of spring days end up with, and it costs less than one very good pair.

Sun protection is the real spring issue

The clothing changes above are comfort. This one is not. Spring combines a higher sun angle, longer days, and the same reflective snowfield, and it produces the worst sunburn of the ski season - frequently on people who skied all winter without burning once.

• High-SPF sunscreen before you leave, reapplied at lunch. Under the chin and the underside of the nose, because the light is coming from below.
• Lip balm with sun protection. The most forgotten item and the one that ruins the last two days of a trip.
• A darker lens. Spring is the one time a genuine bright-sun lens earns its place; the goggle in this ledger that ships with two lenses is exactly the case for that. The VLT guide has the bands.
• Do not push the goggles onto your helmet. Reflected UV is what causes snow blindness, and spring is when it happens.
• A hat or a helmet, and cover your neck. The back of the neck burns when you are looking downhill all day. The altitude and sun page has the whole picture.

Ski the morning, not the afternoon

Spring conditions follow the sun. Early morning is frozen and fast - genuinely hard, sometimes icy. Mid-morning through early afternoon is the good window, when the surface has softened into what people call corn snow and is about as pleasant as skiing gets. By mid afternoon it is heavy slush that grabs a ski and is tiring.

So the spring day is shaped differently: start later than you would in January, ski the middle of the day, and stop earlier. That is also better for the sun exposure and, for a family, better for the tempers.

Two things to do afterward

Spring snow is dirty. It carries grit, pine needles and, at the bottom of the mountain, whatever the parking lot had on it.

• Wax after wet dirty days. Slush strips wax quickly and leaves grit behind. The waxing page has the sequence.
• Dry everything properly. Wet gear at the end of a spring day is wetter than at the end of a winter one, and this is the season boots come home genuinely soaked. Pull the liners out.
• Then store it properly, because spring is the end of the season. Everything that goes away wet comes back worse, and rusted edges over a summer are the most common self-inflicted damage in the sport.

For what it is worth, spring is also the cheapest time to buy anything. The when-to-buy page covers the calendar, and end-of-season is when last year’s gear is cleared out.