When are fins needed?

There are two situations where fins are very important. One is sidehill. In mountains when you are contouring hills (even in soft snow), any pulk will tend to want to slide downhill rather than follow your track. Our system does a good job with the front of your pulk, but without fins, the back of the sled slides downhill making traversing more difficult.

The second situation is on icy or hard packed downhills (even moderate downhills). The sled does fine until you stop; then it wants to keep going. If the place you stop is icy, the back of the sled can "break" out from your path and tend to slide sideways around you. It is kind of like a car fish-tailing on ice. The hip belt ends up spinning around your waist in the process.

Both these problems are fixed by using fins. The only disadvantage is the added friction. To provide the option, we have created a system that allows the fins to be removed and either mounted inside the sled or stored in your pack. In the Snow Clipper we took it one step further and designed fins that are retractable.