Gear

Following on from this thread, I've picked up pair of second hand Aspira salopettes. It appears they don't come with integral gaiters. From the blurb on Paramo's website this seems intentional ("Now made without snow gaiters for use with modern leather boot/gaiter combinations") but it seems like a little bit of an inconvenience to me.

What do other people do in this sort of situation? I note that Furtech recommend and sell a pair of small, lightweight gaiters to go with their claw trousers but Petesy didn't have anything nice to say about them in his review. Presumably someone decided it would be a good idea to take the snow gaiters out, so I'd hope there are sensible alternatives!

My Aspira salopettes are 10 years old and do have internal snow cuffs. So do the Cioch salopettes I replaced them with last year. I find that they're great around the chunky ankles of my plastic telemark ski boots and that's all I need. However with any of my winter walking boots the internal cuffs just don't stay in place to form any kind of seal worth having.

I also have the short Paramo gaiters and have used them quite successfully with the salopettes, but last year the snow was sometimes so deep that plunging in to it forced a gap between short gaiter and salopette leg for snow to enter. So I switched over to using full length gaiters, but often wore them inside the salopettes leg - that worked just fine. Mine are quite old Extremities goretex / cordura affairs, but if I needed to replace them I'd probably get the full-length Paramo gaiters.

i use paramo long gaiters in the snow with my salopettes (if i'm not in wellies). i had ankle gaiters on an early pair of ski trews and i wasn't imperssed with them. fine over a ski boot but almost pointless with anything other than high leg boots as they wouldn't remain covering the bit that needed covering..