Here's How I Turned My Atomic Remedy 130 Into A Touring Boot

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I’ll admit that my personal preferences for ski gear exist in a pretty weird corner of the industry. I’m lucky enough to ski something like 100 days a year (yes, it’s my job), and I love spreading that out between pretty much any kind of skiing there is. Living in the Tetons, I’ve developed a fond appreciation and a pretty big appetite for exploring the high mountains around my home while ski touring, but I won’t lie and say that I don’t love using chairlifts to access the goods either. Thankfully, both of my local hills have some of the best lift-access backcountry skiing on the planet–meaning I can ski huge backcountry powder runs on my resort gear and not lightweight touring gear.

A few years ago, I came to the conclusion that skiing in the backcountry without the ability to travel back uphill on skis was a bad idea. Of course, I wanted the ability to enjoy the performance of stiff, damp boots and “real” alpine skis, but a few close calls and some funky conditions a few years ago (and this year!) made me realize that tourability was actually extremely important. What would I do if I skied first and a friend needed help above me or I needed to respond to an avalanche emergency in deep snow without touring skis? There was also the question of how to access lines that were farther away from the resort where bootpacking/sidestepping wasn’t an option for access. I still wanted to ski those on the highest-performing gear I had. Of course, the issue didn’t lie in the skis or bindings. Hybrid bindings like the Shift, CAST Freetour, Duke PT, and Tyrolia Attack Hybrid are a dime a dozen these days. You can mount those on any freeride or powder ski and have yourself a heavy-duty touring setup. The problem was in the boots.

Long story short, I’ve become really accustomed to skiing a stiff freeride or race-style boot in the resort with a fixed cuff. Of course, if I’m ski touring, I’m skiing a boot with a walk mode, like the Tecnica Zero G Tour Pro or Dynafit Blacklight. That’s the right tool for that job. However, I really don’t like skiing a walk mode boot inbounds. I’ve rotated between a few different stiff inbounds boots and there’s just something about the power transfer, damping, and fit that I’m hooked on, both for ripping inbounds laps and skiing big terrain out the gates.

When Fischer first released their RC4 130 MV Pro DYN, essentially a race-style boot with tech fittings just in the toe, it was right around the time I came to my realization that I should be considering uphill travel capability mandatory in the sidecountry. I happily switched over to riding that boot, because it offered indistinguishable performance to an alpine boot. In fact, it was an alpine boot that just happened to have compatibility with a hybrid binding. It wasn’t a new idea–the Chickering-Ayers brothers over at CAST have been converting alpine boots for years–but it was the first time a major brand had added it to their highest-performing fixed cuff boots as an option out of the factory. K2 followed suit with the Recon 140 the following year, and now offer the Cortex boot with a similar design.

This year, I’ve fallen in love with the Atomic Remedy 130, a narrow-last race boot that’s been re-jiggered as a freeride boot. It quickly replaced the Fischer boot for me, mostly because of the fit. It’s super low volume, very stiff, has thick plastic for incredible damping and suspension, and features the most comfortably aggressive stance I’ve ever experienced in a boot. Considering how many of these boots I’ve seen on skier’s feet this year, I think I’m not alone in that sentiment. I fell in love with skiing these boots, but as the sidecountry filled in I started thinking heavily about the lesson I had learned about uphill capability. The Remedy didn’t have tech fittings in the toe, so I couldn’t use it with a hybrid binding. The solution? Take matters into my own hands and DIY it.

For the record, a friend showed me this Instagram video after I had showed him my newly modified boots…and that’s definitely another way to do it.

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Let me add another disclaimer. I cannot stress enough that this is a very easy way to completely destroy your very expensiveski boots, and I do not recommend doing this on your own unless you’re willing to sacrifice your boots. I’m merely offering this as a reference to say that it is possible to make this modification. You will void the warranty on any boot you make this modification to, and I can’t stress enough that you should NEVER try to ski this setup in a binding like the Marker Kingpin or Fritschi Tecton. This will only (maybe) work with a binding that has a full alpine toe in downhill ski mode.

If you want to convert a non walk mode boot, I’d highly recommend calling up the folks at CAST Touring and having them do it professionally. I was actually planing to do that, but they were in the middle of moving their shop, so their machines were offline and I didn’t want to wait.

Here’s how I modified my boots:

Step #1 was sourcing some Dynafit-style tech inserts for the toe. These aren’t easy to find, and the best way would be to harvest them off some old boots you find at thrift store, yard sale, or in your garage. You might be surprised to learn that the toe pin inserts are actually one piece, with a metal bar going through the width of the boot connecting the left- and right-side pin holes.

Once I had the parts, it was time to disassemble the Remedy boots. Pulling the GripWalk sole blocks off was a matter of just undoing the four screws that hold them into the scafo (lower). Part of the appeal of the Remedy is it’s GripWalk soles. Atomic took their existing Redster Club Sport boots and modified the bottoms to accommodate removable GripWalk sole blocks. The whole boot is actually just five pieces of plastic: the cuff, the scafo, the internal rubber bootboard, and the toe and heel blocks. It’s all held together by a few screws, the ankle pivots, and the bolt in the spine.

Once the toe blocks were off, it was time to get creative. I knew I was going to have to cut into the plastic of the shell and the toe block to make room for the thin metal insert, I lined up the Dynafit insert with the toe of the boot to eyeball roughly where it needed to sit, and marked it with a Sharpie. Then I grabbed a Dremel with a grinding bit and got to work, very carefully shaving off the plastic where I needed to make room for the insert. This was pretty scary work, since I knew that one slip could permanently destroy the boot. It’s important to note that the toe height of any alpine boot is standardized to a very tight tolerance (so it fits into your binding and releases properly). I had to be extremely careful to avoid cutting to deep into the plastic and removing too much material. With the Dremel, I cut into both the boot scafo and the toe block to accommodate the tech fitting, since it has to sit flush with both.

Once I was satisfied with the amount of room I had made for the insert, it was time to test fit it. It took a few extra passes with the Dremel to have it sit perfectly–I had to make sure that it was both flush with the sole, flat horizontally, and in line with the centerline of the boot.

Once I was happy with the amount of drilling and shaving I had done, I drove two short screws through the tech fitting to secure it to the boot sole. Once those were in, it was time to permanently bond it all together with epoxy. I backed out the screws, then covered the whole metal insert with epoxy, filling in all the gaps around it, and re-inserted the screws and insert, before attaching the sole block over everything, sandwiching it all in place. I used J-B Weld 8265S Original Cold-Weld Steel Reinforced Epoxy, which is easy to mix and apply and has a strength rating of up to 5020 psi.

Once the pieces were all together, I clamped the whole toeblock in place for a few hours to let the epoxy set, before clamping the boot into a binding overnight to let the whole setup cure. Of course, I did this whole process for both boots. The next day, I took some sandpaper and polishing wheel on the Dremel to clean up the whole front of the boots, and it was time to test!

My initial test was to check how close I was able to get the overall toe heights of the boot to the GripWalk standard of 19mm +/- 1mm. By not grinding too far into either the boot scafo or the toeblock, I didn’t actually modify the toeheight at all. It still matched the standard! Test 1? Pass.

The second test was to see how straight and level I had installed the new insert. I did this by clicking the boot into the toe of a pin binding on ski on my workbench and moving it through a stride to see where the boot centerline landed on the rear of the ski. This is actually a little less important, because I’m only ever going to tour in these boots when they’re attached by the toe pins, so perfect alignment doesn’t really matter from a performance standpoint–a degree or two off would make a huge difference when skiing, but I wouldn’t notice it when touring. Luckily, I was within a degree on both boots!

Finally, I wanted to make sure everything was bonded strong enough, so it was time to test it on snow. I took my heaviest touring-capable skis (in this case the new Völkl Revolt 112 with a Duke PT) and went for a short ski tour. I tried to twist the boot in the binding every which way, skin on heinous off-camber sidehills, and really try to put as much force through the setup as possible. It felt rock solid. Of course, time will tell how long this modification will last compared to a factory-installed fitting that’s molded directly into the plastic, but I’m not planning on going on huge ski tours regularly on these.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.