Love them. Seems to be sized a little small. I normally wear a 7.5, got these in an 8. The fit it great. Snug heel, good arch, doesn't kill the toes. I can wear them on long multi pitch without discomfort and they still perform well as good as I could want them. Just got done with a week in Cochise Stronghold. Everything I did required trusting feet a lot!. It didn't take long to learn to trust the shoes to smear all over those walls.

Gotta Get You Some!!! Just spent two days skiing inbounds and loved them. Axls give you control with a capital "C". I've been skiing with Rottefella R6 bindings. The easiest of the three Axl settings was more aggressive than the R6. Talk about cranking out some good quick turns on less than ideal conditions. Hardpack, moguls, steep terrain. I didn't get to try them out of bounds so I can't tell you how they'll go in the real world. The only potential problem that I could see is icing over the switch for free pivot and locked in. Despite it getting packed full of slush and ice I was still able to slide the switch back and forth with the pole with some work. I'm considering this to be a minor inconvenience for such a great ride. I wear a pair of BD Stiletto's size 25.5 and the small bindings fit with some room to spare.

Over all I love the Palisades II. I have a lean boxer cross so I had to restitch all of the chest straps to get it to fit appropriately. I'm not too enthusiastic about the water bladders. After some abuse one of them has started to leak a little and its hard to fill them evenly and empty them evenly since you can't see through the plastic or pull them out easily when they have water in them. Two other modifications that are easy that I did were to add a string between the front belly cinch and the flank cinch, the back one, to pul the flank cinch forward, since it seemed that this strap was hanging out dangerously close to my dogs nether regions and was causing some chafing problems especially when crusted in snow and ice. The other thing I altered was that I put a strap under the two bags connecting them together so that they wouldn't flop around as he went galloping down hill. Seems to have done the trick and both me and the beast are much happier with the results.