Ski touring
Also known as: skinning, alpine touring
Climbing on skis under your own power and then descending, which produces hours of uphill and a handful of minutes worth filming.
Updated
What it means
Touring is a long climb with a short reward. Several hours of skinning uphill, one descent, and a ratio between effort and usable footage that nothing else in snow sports comes anywhere near.
Weight decides what gets carried. Every camera, battery and lens is lifted a thousand metres, which makes the equipment decision an entirely different calculation from the one a resort day involves.
It is the access method for Backcountry terrain rather than a separate discipline. The skiing at the end is the same skiing; the whole difference is everything that had to happen before it.
How it works in practice
The climb is its own material. Skin tracks, light, weather and effort make a strong opening section, which is the part a resort edit never has available to it.
Batteries live against the body on the way up. Cold-weather battery life collapses in the cold, and a battery warmed in a jacket performs where one left in a pack simply does not.
One camera is usually the honest answer. A worn camera and a phone will cover a whole tour, where carrying three bodies uphill means filming less rather than more, because everything about the day takes longer.
What to watch out for
The descent happens once. There is no lapping, so a camera that was not ready or a position that was wrong has lost the only descent of the entire day.
Condensation arrives at the hut rather than on the hill. Equipment brought from cold into warm fogs internally, which produces Housing fog in everything filmed for the rest of the trip.
Snow brightness defeats automatic metering. A white slope fills the frame and a camera underexposes the skier, so Spot metering or a deliberate compensation is needed before the descent actually starts.
How RawClip handles it
A day that produced one descent and three hours of climbing still assembles into something watchable, since the climb supplies the quieter material and the descent supplies the peaks. The uphill is not reviewed by anybody, which is the part that makes this format survivable.