La Sportiva Kilo

“A carpenter, a landscape photographer and a climber wake up one day and decide to develop a ski touring boot that walks like a dream on the uphill, is fun on the down and weighs just a kilo.”

We’re in Passo del Tonale in northern Italy, which we’ve nicknamed Tonale Beach due to the springlike temperatures that make each outing on the snow a tanning session worthy of the best salons. 

The unseasonable weather however proves to be the best possible for testing skimo equipment, as the variable conditions throughout the day mean we can test it on everything from hard, icy early morning snow, which with the first rays of sun transform into spring snow, then late spring firn, while in the shade we can still find some powder stashes that have avoided the UV rays.  

We’ve chosen the Pisganino route, a firm favorite in the area often used by athletes for training, which starts from the car park next to the Paradiso cable car (or for mere mortals like us, from Passo Presena via the lifts), then descends to Mandrone and heads back uphill for a few hundred meters towards Passo Pisgana. An excellent choice for when you don’t want to make too much effort, as with just 400–500 m of vertical you can ski 2,000 m down to the neighboring resort of Ponte di Legno. It’s an essential tour for anyone passing through the area. 

The cable car reaches its destination and we interrupt our conversation to prepare for the first descent down the south face of the valley. We fasten our buckles and clip into our bindings, sliding fast on the still-frozen terrain towards Lake Scuro, weaving between sastrugi and blocks of granite laying in wait beneath a thin layer of ice. The fastest route cuts across high above Lake Mandrone, but to add a little extra vertical gain to the test we decide to take the long way round and ski down to its semi-frozen shore. While we grab our skins and prepare for the ascent, we get back to the topic at hand.  “In terms of materials, we went with Grilamid Bio Based LF Carbon for both the shell and cuff. It’s a plant-based mixture derived from responsibly-sourced castor oil from sustainable plantations in dry, remote areas where it’s difficult to cultivate anything else without using agricultural terrain essential to the local population,” explains Mauro, who is wearing two different boots to test the latest modifications made to the liner. Grilamid Bio has the great advantage of being largely immune to fluctuations in temperature. It’s very stable at both high and low temperatures, as well as being loaded with long carbon fibers, an innovation exclusive to the Italian brand. To use these fibers they needed to make custom molds specifically for this project, which also let them experiment with new shapes and volumes for the shells, which have been designed for the light segment with a focus on comfort and larger volumes. 

The time has come to make the most of the long descent into the valley. The snow has warmed up enough to make the downhill fun and let our edges get a good grip, save for the odd windswept section. We ski down the middle of the wide Pisganino valley. Iac pops off kickers with the agility of a teenager in a freestyle competition, with a lightness that these days is rare even among the best athletes on the World Cup circuit. We stop to take a few photos before entering a couloir, the most iconic section of the route. After a few hop turns at the narrowest point, we point our tips down the valley, sailing past the imposing blue ice waterfalls of the Val Sozzine. Judging by how the guys ate up the descent, it would seem that the boot more than did its job. We let it rip down the toboggan run that leads to the Ponte di Legno ski area, slaloming between branches and rocks, our quads burning. Despite the difficult conditions, we still managed to find an enjoyable route, and we’re more than happy with how the day turned out. 

At low speeds there isn’t much flex, you need to know what you’re doing, whereas when you ski harder the plastics flex progressively with no bulging and good elastic return, helping entry into and exit from turns. Compared to the average boot in this segment, it’s incredibly comfortable and easy to walk in, things which have a slight effect on precision when skiing and on the diagonal, though without compromising on performance. Davide concludes: “The buckles are one of its strong points, they’re ergonomic and easy to adjust, unlike in many models in this category. The streamlined ski/walk mechanism hugs the cuff, so you don’t catch it on your trousers or on rocks. It’s a completely different product to anything else Laspo has made, and bound to be a huge success”

What more can we say? It looks like the Kilo was a hit, roll in September. What does it weigh, we hear you ask? We’re sure you can work that one out for yourselves.