Big Sky Skins Mohair Mix Persistence Review

The Big Sky Mohair Mix Persistence Skins have confidence-inspiring glue performance, an efficient carpet, and great packability. We enjoyed how reliable these skins were for days with multiple transitions, but admit that their setup is getting a bit outdated. If you are good with your hands and don't mind a little work to get your skins set up, the Big Sky skins are a good choice for long-lasting glue performance and durability.

Glide

Skins with good glide can sometimes be the difference between having the energy for one more lap on a pow day and packing it up early to hit the foam roller. Mohair is the gold standard for smooth glide and water resistance, and the Big Sky skins offer a blend of 65% mohair and 35% nylon. This mix allows for smooth glide without sacrificing grip.

The Big Sky skins have excellent glide, but there is a short break-in period. The first day on them feels a little grabby, but after a couple of laps, you can feel them sticking less and providing a dreamy low-friction surface. The skins come with a bar of skin wax, which is pretty nice for keeping your skins dry and sliding well. While most riders pick up some skin wax as they become more experienced, it is pretty cool that Big Sky throws it in the package from the start. They know that it's an essential piece of kit and people should have it.

Grip

A whole lot of glide can save you a lot of energy, but you don't want to waste it by fighting to keep your grip on the uphill. Arguably more energy exhausting than sticky skins are skins that constantly slip backward. We find that most options on the market offer plenty of grip when used with proper technique, but every pair has its limits. If you try to charge vertically up a mountain rather than switchbacking and keeping a lower-angle skintrack, you'll be pushing your luck.

The Big Sky Skins offer plenty of grip for appropriate skin track angles. The blended material uses 35% nylon, as opposed to the 30% used in many other models, which may contribute to its great grip performance. It also has to do with the length and angle of the fibers used on the skin. While it is believed that mohair provides glide at the sacrifice of grip, this is not always true if the fibers are long enough and laid at an angle that gives them good bite. The Big Sky Skins did a good job of getting this ratio right, and they offered an excellent balance of grip and glide.

Ease of Use

Attaching and removing skins from your split board can be one of the most frustrating parts of backcountry touring. Once you start getting into swallow-tail snowboards and other weird shapes, you take on new levels of challenge to get the skins to stay on your board. This is evident with the Big Sky. The attachment system is really good for normal-shaped boards but struggles more with swallow and chopped tail shapes. We liked the tensioning lock for keeping things tight, but it was difficult to adjust its length.

The most frustrating part about the Big Sky Skins is the initial setup. Some companies are now at the point of selling partially preshaped skins that only require one cut on the side of the board to get them to fit. Big Sky has chosen to let you construct the entire tip of your skin. This DIY process isn't something new; in the past, it was standard, but today it feels a bit outdated compared to what's available from other brands. The other issue is that the skins don't come with a guided cutting tool, only a razor blade. This means you need to move your skins left and right of the edge to cut them so they line up inside the edges at the end. Doing this and ending up with perfectly aligned cuts at the end requires intense attention to detail.

We ended up using a guided cutting tool from a different brand to cut the edges of these skins and save us time compared to Big Sky's recommended method. This worked, and surely got us from A to B faster, but the skins left glue all over our edges, which added a fair bit of clean-up time to our project.

Glue

Glue is another crucial element of your climbing skins. Each component has to work, and all the grip and glide talk means nothing if your skin isn't sticking to your base. Worst case scenario, your skins can sometimes leave glue on your base, compromising your ride down. The Big Sky skins use their proprietary glue formula that they say is a “migrating” glue, meaning it balls up and rolls around every time you peel the skins apart, giving you a fresh glue over and over again. While we're not entirely sure how that technology works, we can say that it does work. These skins felt brand new every time we put them on. The stick to the base is truly excellent, almost too excellent, as we found ourselves waxing our boards quite a bit more after we started using these skins. That said, after having so many glue failures with other skins, the extra stick is worth it. Other than our mishap with the glue sticking to the edges during cutting, we had no more issues with the glue being left on the base of our boards.

Should You Buy The Big Sky Mohair Mix Persistence Skins?

If you're good with your hands and want an incredibly durable pair of skins with glue that seems to never get old, these are a great option. Sometimes durability comes at the cost of packability and weight in the world of climbing skins, but Big Sky has changed that. These skins offer long-lasting glue and a tough carpet in a packable and lightweight package.

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