The perfect app would behave like a specific multisport where the parts when you are skinning up would behave like hiking and the descents would behave like downhill skiing. Tracking the transitions independently would be helpful, too.
Then - being fully aware that it might not be a perfect solution for you - I'd suggest creating a custom multisport profile with transitions enabled.
This cannot work as you seldom know how many transitions you will do :) This is dictated by terrain, weather, avalanche danger, ascent tactics, fatigue and dozens other factors. I can live with hiking and manual laps where I beep out the transitions... I just find it idiotic that the watch does not do what one would assume it does based on the marketing.
When defining a multisport profile you can enable repeats, which means that the cycle will continue until you stop the activity. Besides you can always switch sports manually on-the-go. This way you don't have to know in advanced how many transitions to expect.
Interesting. Will try that. If I understand this correctly, I can define an "infinite" multisport where Hiking and Alpine Skiing alternate upon the lap button hit. That sounds very much like Skitouring to me. Of course, the problem of the whole Connect environment not knowing the term itself stands but technically the recording would be what we want it to be.
I have a Fenix 5 (without X or S) and also miss a dedicated app for ski mountaineering. It's just stupid that Garmin is not willing to offer this. Instead we get apps for indoor weightlifting and indoor rowing and all this nonsense. Building a native app for this would probably need 2 hours of time for a Garmin programmer. I just don't understand this, because the ski touring/skimo community is really big and is from year to year growing. Garmin will miss a lot of customers if they just ignore this trend. So if you think logically, this is a trending sport where they could grab a lot of new customers, it's not just about satisfying the needs of existing customers, which would be also a good reason for doing that of course.
Very disappointed with this kind of company policy.
Any manually customized nor developed app will not work unless Garmin create Ski Touring as a new Activity type. Besides the listed above reasons, another is that in a mixed season you run and skitour, both. It is possible to skitour and xco ski. But the reports for climbed vertical meters or distance can not separate the activity type... Suunto provide such activity type. Sports tracker also.
Great thread. I am a triathlete, big fan of the Fenix 3, and during the off season I do skiing and (more importantly) alpine touring to keep up the training. Heading tomorrow incidentally, and thus I googled how I could record this. I would imagine an AT activity along the lines discussed would be a popular addition by Garmin.
Will try to create a hiking/skiing multisport as described. Thanks!
