The first Fischer skis to bear the Ranger name were essentially wider versions of Fischer’s classic wood-and-Titanal all-terrain skis, that were themselves near relatives of race skis. They were ponderous barges that sought to subjugate powder rather than caress it. That formula didn’t fly too far, so the pendulum swung in the other direction, capitalizing on Fischer’s expertise in lightweight cross-country ski cores to make a featherweight series of Rangers.
If that was the perfect solution, this generation of Rangers would still be among the living. Turns out, all-terrain skiing includes hard, brittle snow, often on steep terrain. Bantamweight construction comes up short in this situation, and so the search continued.
A couple of seasons ago, the pendulum swung back, and this time Fischer hit the mark: a ski that’s solid but not stodgy, with a shape that lends itself equally to smearing and carving, and steering control in all conditions. The baseline of the 21/22 Ranger 99 Ti is amply rockered, so it rolls over irregular terrain with aplomb, and when all the freshies have been flattened into groomers, an extra dose of Titanal underfoot keeps the Ranger 99 on course. Fischer has finally found the elusive balance between the needs for off-trail imprecision and on-trail accuracy.
The Ranger 99 Ti of today seems to be a ski without bias. It could care less about snow conditions, has no qualms about long turns at high speeds or short arcs at a snail’s pace and can switch from a drift to a carve in mid-turn. Its monotonously good scores were above our Recommended cut line for every attribute we measure.
Another bias that the Ranger 99 Ti eschews is any trace of gender bias. The men’s and women’s versions are identical save for the decoration on the topsheet, and Fischer’s rationale for this homogeneity holds water. At this skill level, men and women tend to ski alike, so the need for a differentiated women’s product is little to none. Our female testers validated this approach, praising the 99 Ti in particular for its off-piste performance.
Our male testers laud the Ranger 99 Ti’s agility for a ski of its girth, calling it “nimble and quick to turn,” “light and playful,” and “best short turns of the big mountain, soft snow skis.” Its relatively zippy reflexes belie a sublime stability at speed that eluded the previous generation of Rangers but is inbred in the new 99 Ti. “It’s a solid edition to the Fischer family,” vows Jack Walzer of Jan’s, who has been an aficionado of Fischers for a generation.
By tweaking everything – core, baseline, sidewalls – Fischer transformed this commercially important model from what was once a lightweight who got beat up by mean conditions like hard snow or chunky crud into a lean machine that doesn’t take any crap from any kind of snow, no matter what the Eskimos call it. The Ranger 99 Ti deserves to be considered among the first rank of All-Mountain West models.