New Product Preview
As realskiers subscribers, it’s only fitting you be granted special access to what lies ahead in the pantheon of skis. I had a good look at the near future over a 3-day span at the recent Mammoth Mountain trade fair. The official industry-only demo occupied only two days on the calendar, but a glorious unofficial third day was tacked on the front end, thanks to a quickly contrived convocation including some dozen dealers and roughly the same number of ski brands.
On the unofficial day, there were no stinking badges, no long trudges across the parking lot to retrieve the next ski. It was curbside service, so to speak: the rep vans backed up to the edge of the elevated snow surface so you could swap skis in seconds. Nearly everyone was on a first-name basis, often with decades of shared history.
The snow was remarkable considering the year the Sierras have endured. Allow me to pause a moment to thank Mammoth for their brilliant management of their small allotment of natural snow. If you haven’t skied Mammoth for several seasons, or you’ve somehow left it off your bucket list, let me suggest you correct these defects soon.
The reason I’m waxing euphoric over the conditions is because it’s hard to manufacture such a brilliant testing ground. Mammoth knows how to groom (a forgotten art in some locales) and what faces to leave up to the wind to structure. If you didn’t test a ski in at least three different conditions in one top-to-bottom run, you didn’t try.
The general delight over the conditions was magnified by the fact that over the years a lot of the assembled good skiers have also become very good friends. This has been one of the driest winters on record, yet the energy level was off the charts.
As I mentioned in my weekly blog post (The Spotlight Shifts to Frontside Skis), the big picture distillate of the event was that narrow-waisted skis kicked ass. But that statement shouldn’t obscure the fact that a lot of strong skiers (both physically and talent-wise) have no issues with charging on a ski with a waist in the 107mm range.
The runaway success of the Rossi Soul 7 this season proves that there’s a robust market for skis with this geometry. Uneasy lies the crown, however, in that that next season a new Big Mountain darling may be anointed. Blizzard may re-capture some momentum with their Cochise model now that they’ve trimmed its core profile to make it about 15% less burly.
Salomon will introduce a new ski that, while it bears a “Q” in its name, couldn’t be a more radical departure from their current collection of “Q” models. The Q-Lab is allegedly a Salomon downhill ski fleshed out to a 104mm width (@183cm). After taking it out for a couple of spins, I’m inclined to agree. It’s a big-boy ski that likes to get after it.
While the new king of the Q’s is more beefy, Salomon has lightened the weight and demeanor of the current Enduro series with its offspring, the X-Drive family. Noticeably quicker and more energetic off the edge without any apparent loss in stability (compared to the Enduro 850), the flagship X-Drive 8.8 FS is a gifted all-terrain tool.
I’ll take a closer look at what’s new in narrower footprints in my next dispatch from the front lines.
– Jackson Hogen
