Laying tracks - Question(s)

1) Is it faster to do many switch backs directly up (or) longer traverses with fewer switch backs?

2) Is it easier to stay on the ridge navigating the maze of trees or lay a track on the leeward or windward side of the ridge?

I am not referring to steepness and I know track choices vary with conditions but all things being equal which is fastest / easiest / best in a given situation? It seems to me many tracks include needless switchbacks. This is especially true in the trees where instead of just going past a tree and continuing a traverse they switch back, run into another tree 20 yards away and do it all over again!

i guess i fall into the camp of folks as you describe that go 20 yards then do another switchback (specifics of terrain, slope, everything else being tossed out for this discussion). If the slope i'm skinning up is the slope i'm going to be skiing down, i'd rather have the skin track take up a limited swath of powder so that on the trip down i won't experience that annoying 'cu-thunk, cu-thunk' of having a nice powder run marred by skiing over my skin track.   Also, keeping the skin track in a nice relatively tight area keeps the uphill traffic away from the downhill traffic so folks aren't skiing directly down on parties that are on their way up.

and i'd be willing to bet the amount of time saved doing only ten switchbacks vs thirty on any given climb is only a minute or two if you know what you're doing....not worth running a big zig zag all the way across a ski slope vs. a bunch of small switchbacks.

just my two cents....

1) for me it's faster to climb with the least amount of switchbacks, depends on the route/terrain of course, but keeping a steady cadence while climbing conserves energy while doing switchbacks burns more energy. However, I also do agree that keeping the skin track out of the intended ski slope is nice, and I've thrown in a couple extra switchbacks at times to accommodate the run. If it's a popular area it seems the appropriate thing to do.

2) I ask myself this every time I skin up Pea Gravel ridge here on Hood...

It's usually FASTEST to let someone else make the decision about where the track is to go and just follow them.

If you're the one breaking trail, I'd say steepness of the track is as much a factor as number of switchbacks (assuming all in your party are comfortable making uphill kickturns). I vote for moderate steepness and a moderate number of direction changes if you have freedom of choice (ie. huge open slope with stable snow conditions). More often than not, terrain dictates where you will go and how often you will change directions - typically at the top of steep, narrow places around here you can only take a few strides before kickturning. There's also considerations like wanting to stay in a protected, treed area or not under a huge cornice or not in a deep pocket of wind slab, etc. If you are put off by the idea of switchbacks for their own sake you probably need to practice uphill kickturns.

I'm with Pete A in not wanting waste the untracked by laying my skintrack through it - if I'm planning on skiing the slope I'm skinning, I try to keep the uptrack confined to a relatively small area. I usually count strides, somewhere between 30 and 50 before kickturning. Sometimes I turn when my uphill leg starts to feel worked, a sure sign you're losing efficiency.

As far as ridge travel goes, slightly off to the windward side is most often the quickest and safest . . . but like everything else in ski touring, there are exceptions.

Ditto what GregL said.

There are lots of variables to weigh, of course, with safety and downhill-line-preservation tending to take precedence over efficiency of uptrack. There's also aesthetics - e.g. taking the track in directions and to spots that yield nice and varied views, and other angles on efficiency such as aiming for spots where you can change direction w/o a kick turn such as a small knoll or a flat around a tree well or avoiding slope areas where you'll get stuck doing a zillion little switchbacks (unless of course that's the only safe or otherwise smart spot to clime). But as for efficiency, if you are looking at a wide slope with few obstacles, fewer switchbacks will be more efficient for sure (barring uphill leg exhaustion that Greg describes - that would either be a really really long switchback and/or a very steep slope). And if you are skiing with folks who aren't very experienced climbers, the efficiency delta can be even larger, as kick turns are where folks tend to have the most problems (losing skins, falling over... all of which spends time).

As for untracked pow preservation, if you have a wide enough slope, what are one or three uptrack segments to cross on the way down? You can arguably "lose" none of the slope to the uptrack with few long switchbacks, versus many tighter where you almost certainly won't want to ski down through the uptrack zone. In most conditions, if you time your turn before the track crossing right, you almost don't feel it. All that said, most of the winter touring I do has uptrack and downtrack in fairly different spots, more from which is most pleasant for each phase of the tour than out of an attempt to preserve a pristine canvas for the turns.

In the "running into a tree" situation described in the OP, it is often more efficient to simply relax the angle a bit ahead of the tree to allow the path to go under it, and then resume the desired climb angle, versus switchbacking only to face the same problem 20 yards ahead. I suspect this notion is at least a bit up for debate based on the tracks I sometimes see out there, which give me a sense that even a few feet of moderate-angled climbing is seen as defeat for some.

I tend to agree with Greg and Jim on the moderate climbing angle. Most professional guides I’ve know tend to climb at a much more moderate angle than the testosterone stoked newby with wall-to-wall skins on his uberfat boards. Following someone that’s trying to prove how steep they can climb can tend to prove problematic as subsequent skin track users seldom get as much traction as the trail breaker. For a skintrack to be at the most efficient climbing angle it should be at a moderate climbing angle.

As far as switchbacks, I’ll try and make as many of the direction changes as I can, more rounded (rather than kick turns) so the direction change can be made with a series of small “AVA” turns without missing stride.
Unless terrain and/or snow conditions dictate otherwise (such as when preferring to climb along a ridge or within a band of trees) I tend to avoid zig-zagging up line or coolly with frequent kick turns, which then expose everyone on the skin track to avy hazard from above. Whenever I’m on such an uptrack memories of the La Traviata accident are rekindled. So as Greg and Jim both touched on, unless there a good reason not to, I favor longer traverse legs which expose fewer folks to hazard in any one location. That way, given proper spacing it will be less likely that more than one person could be exposed to a slide triggered on the skin track or from above.

Spacing is important too. Take a look at the photo in the lower left corner of THIS PAGE showing the La Traviata accident site where 7 people died, which shows their spacing when the avy occurred. Had they been better spaced out possible at least one or two more may have survived, even with the zig-zag uptrack.