I Tested The Lightest Certified Avalanche Shovel In The World

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Backcountry skiers are all about shaving weight. We obsess over finding lighter skis, bindings, boots, even backpacks–but one place that’s been conspicuously absent from the gram-counting has been in our avalanche rescue gear. As a weight-curious backcountry skier myself, I’ve long been hesitant to cut weight from arguably the most important pieces of gear I carry. When it comes to the ability of being able to perform an avalanche rescue, I don’t want to trade a few grams for durability. In other words, I need to be able to rely on my shovel and probe to work when it matters most. What good is carrying a few less grams if it means I can’t actually use the damn thing in an emergency?

Last year, a new company out of Slovenia called PurePeak set out to address this. Why couldn’t there be an avalanche shovel that was both ultralight and reliable? To them, it came down to a simple engineering problem. The answer lay in carefully-designed carbon fiber construction to save weight where they could, without compromising structural integrity. At 305 grams, the PurePeak Super Light Avalanche Shovel is the lightest rescue shovel on the market that is certified to the UIAA 156 standard.

PurePeak Super Light Avalanche Shovel Specs

• Weight: 305 grams (0.67 pounds)
• Size: 22cm × 24cm blade, 75.8cm handle (extended), 38.5cm handle (collapsed)
• Features: full carbon fiber construction, collapsible T-grip handle, steel blade edge

How well does the PurePeak Super Light Avalanche Shovel work?

I’ve been testing the new Slovenian-made PurePeak shovel for the better part of this winter, now carrying it as part of my everyday rescue kit when backcountry skiing. I will admit that I was somewhat hesitant at first, especially after my wife, a ski guide, looked at it with horror. Avalanche shovels need to be extremely durable to ensure they work in an emergency, and carbon isn’t exactly known for its outright durability. To ease her mind, and my own trepidations, I spent some time with it digging in as many different types of snow I could find before committing to actually bringing it into avalanche terrain.

The shovel itself is made almost entirely from carbon fiber, with a thin bit of steel on the cutting edge of the blade. Like many other certified rescue shovels, it features a telescoping handle, a large blade and a T-grip handle.

In real-world use, aka digging in the snow, I found that the PurePeak shovel works just as well as any other rescue shovel I’ve ever used. Sure, the blade is slightly smaller and the handle a few centimeters shorter, but in some side-by-side testing, that didn’t make any meaningful difference in the field. The carbon fiber is extremely stiff, and the steel edge of the blade slices through chunky, frozen debris better than most aluminum shovels I’ve used. I’m not in the business of intentionally triggering large avalanches, so I simulated this by cutting and moving blocks out of a plow pile at the parking lot of my favorite backcountry trailhead.

One small thing that’s a little annoying is that the shovel only locks into place with the handle full extended–I like to shorten the handle to perform stability tests like a CT or an ECT in close quarters snowpits. Not a dealbreaker, but a small detail. The upside is that it actually makes it faster and smoother to deploy the handle in a rescue scenario.

The biggest advantage of this specialized tool, of course, is its light weight. Saving over a pound in my pack might not seem like much, but it’s definitely noticeable on long backcountry tours–especially ones where I might also be carrying extra gear like a rope. That’s equivalent to about 5 standard Snickers Bars, nearly half a liter of water, or about 2 iPhones. The shovel is a bit smaller in size to what I typically used before (Mammut’s 645-gram Alugator Pro Light shovel), giving me slightly more space in my pack.

I’ve tried to inflict as much real-world damage as I possibly can to this thing, short of running it over it with a car, and haven’t been able to do any sort of meaningful destruction. That testing including kicking it, standing on it, trying to pry it at awkward angles in really hard snow (roadside snow banks), and scraping it across my driveway and garage floor. The blade has started to show some signs of wear from scraping it across concrete and other non-snow surfaces, but nothing more than a standard aluminum shovel would. For the record, Chamonix-based IFMGA guide and fellow gear nerd Dave Searle did break the shovel by jumping on it in this video. I tried to replicate that in my own garage and the shovel flexed but didn’t break.

However, the failure in Searle’s video got me thinking. The thing about carbon fiber is that it tends to break catastrophically–unlike aluminum, which can bend and deform quite a bit more before failing completely. In a use case that tends to include repeated violent impacts, like furiously digging in a panic during an avalanche rescue, durability is paramount. Having a tool that works even when it’s a little bit broken is better than one that might be stronger and lighter on paper but won’t work at all once it’s damaged.

Speaking with PurePeak’s founder Matic Meža, he informed me Norwegian pro skier Nikolai Schirmer also managed to break a pre-production version. The particular unit was inspected and the design was tweaked to address the failure point. “We implemented some changes to speed up the production and also made small improvements, with very positive feedback from the users so far. Out of 150 units sold last year not a single complaint. Except one breaking of the preproduction unit which Nikolai was using for the whole year and that shovel wasn’t structurally at the same level as the production ones,” says Meža.

What is the UIAA 156 Standard for avalanche rescue shovels?

While it’s up to manufacturers to design products from the ground up, various regulatory agencies set international standards that products need to comply to for them to be sold in various international markets.

Perhaps the most widely-known one is the DIN (German Institute For Norms), who regulates things like ski bindings and set the standard for what we know as our DIN setting. Then there’s the UIAA (International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation), who set standards to certify climbing and rescue gear.

When it comes to avalanche shovels, the UIAA 156 standard determines size, functionality, and minimum breaking strength for a snow rescue shovel, as well as set testing procedures each product must pass–with hilariously specific details like “the shovel flexural permanent deformation shall be less than 5% of its length dimension when exposed to 300Nm of bending moment.” In other words, avalanche shovels need to be pretty damn strong in order to pass these tests.

How does the PurePeak Shovel compare?

PurePeak isn’t the first company to make a non-metal avalanche shovel. Years ago, many rescue shovel blades were actually made from plastic–which, it turns out, didn’t really hold up to the real-world needs of anyone trying to move frozen avalanche debris. Plastic gets brittle when cold, and just isn’t anywhere near as strong as metal or carbon fiber.

More recently, a few very specialized ultralight rescue shovels hit the market aimed at the skimo racing crowd, namely Arva’s Carbon Race shovel and Black Diamond’s Transfer LT shovel. I’ve used both of them and have managed to break both of them (luckily not in any real-world rescue scenarios…I was using them to shovel my driveway). Jones Snowboards even released a carbon-handled shovel similar to the Arva one, but it seems to have been discontinued.

The 300-gram Arva shovel utilizes a short non-extendable carbon shovel handle and a smaller aluminum blade to offer a product aimed at checking the mandatory safety gear box for competitive skimo racers at events like the Grand Traverse. It is not UIAA certified. Black Diamond’s shovel is aimed at ice climbers and the ultralight ski mountaineering crowd and uses thin riveted 7075 aluminum construction to achieve a 405-gram weight with a UIAA certification.

Compared to both of these options, to me, the PurePeak shovel is a better option. The larger blade size, full-length handle, and lighter weight checks both the weight and functionality box, and so far I’ve found it to be stronger than both.

What type of skier is the PurePeak Shovel for?

Without a doubt, PurePeak’s Super Light Avalanche Rescue Shovel is a very specialized product. Most notably, it’s quite pricey (289 EUR, about 350 USD at publishing), making it more than twice as expensive as most other options on the market. It is, however, nearly half as heavy as those other shovels–so if you really want to shave a pound off your kit and have a few Benjamins burning a whole in your pocket, this is a viable option.

After spending the last few months with this shovel in the real world, I’ve found it’s a tool that I will trust in a rescue. It’s not going to be my only shovel, and I’ll opt to use a aluminum shovel on days I plan to do a lot of shoveling–like digging snow pits, or building a backcountry jump–but for days where I’m doing a lot of walking, the snow is soft, and my shovel likely won’t come out of my pack, I’ll take the weight savings!