Skis for Denali--or just new skis in general

Hey all,

I am planning to climb Denali next year and use skis to either 11k or 14k camp.  My AT setup is pretty darn old.  I am pretty sure I bought them around 2005.

Scarpa Matrix 3-buckle boots (old yellow model)

180cm Volke Mountain Skis  www.freeheellife.com/170cm-Volkl-Mountai...rand-New-p/1011.htm    Dimensions are 104/70/92

Dynafit TLT Vertical bindings.  No brakes and the old-style leash.

What I like about this set-up is that it is super light.  However, it is now about 13 years old, the bindings are loosing their spring and hard to get into, and the skis are very skinny and punch through crust easily, leaving me unable to turn.   I mainly use my AT skis to skin up peaks and get down.  I don't do a lot of back-country touring.  They are mainly to make a 4 hour boot descent into a 30 minute descent.

Any advice for a new setup?  There are so many different boots/skis/bindings out there that I figure I would ask around for opinions first.

Read here.
Virtually a step by step for Skiing Denali.

www.wildsnow.com/25302/denali-gear-list-2018-skiing/

If you aren't too concerned about backountry performance, and want something light to mountaineer with then the go to stuff would be skimo race gear. Tiny skis and binders, 65mm underfoot and 160cm long. This stuff weighs close to nothing, make your light weight setup even lighter. ~700g per ski and ~150g per binding, that's less than two lbs per foot!

As mentioned in the wildsnow article, do consider up-sizing your boot shells for the trip. Its been a long time since I was up there - I went in 2003, used a pair of Dynafit TLT4 boots that were a full size larger than usual so I could use a expedition weight sock in an Intuition liner and still have toe wiggle room. You probably won't get much use out of the boots for other trips as the fit will be pretty sloppy.

Some folks in our group didn't want to by a pair of boots specifically for Denali, so they used their regular ol' AT kit, and then changed their footwear to mountaineering boots for travel above 14k... I didn't want to deal with the hassle and weight of two sets of boots though.

Skis probably don't matter a whole lot, unless you're planning to ski off the top. We dumped ours at 11k as it was so icy it didn't make sense to take them higher, but that was in May...if you're going later in the season when there could be more soft snow, then yeah, skiing down from 14k is more reasonable. We did have some atrocious breakable crust from 11k down and I wish I'd had fatter skis than 75mm waist.

For sleds, our group brought our own - took a little time to make them, but we took kiddie sleds and cut them down so they'd just barely fit inside our big gear duffles for the flight up, then once on the glacier, we took the sleds out and dropped the duffles into them. The sleds we brought also had homemade rigid stays (pvc pipes) and clipped to our pack waist belts - kept the sleds tracking behind us when skiing downhill. Still, don't expect to be doing much more than thigh-burning snowplow turns when heading for basecamp with all your gear.