I’d already been directing the Snow Country Magazine equipment tests for several seasons when editor John Fry made me aware of a DIN standard for ski testing. As with any standard, the test specifications were very strict: the snow surface had to be hard and smooth or the slight nuances among models would be undetectable.
Of course, this was in the epoch before shaped skis and fat boys changed the landscape. All skis derived from Slalom or GS race ski archetypes, and the racecourse was considered the primordial proving ground.
If there were such as thing as an “all-mountain” model, it was a race GS as they were superior crud busters and held better on ungroomed ice. But testing wasn’t to be done in variable conditions that might make the playing field as uneven as the snow surface.
As my methods were extracted from my experience with ski testing while serving as North American product manager for Salomon, I didn’t feel bound by any standardized protocols. I juggled our categories to align with what the weather offered on a given day. We tried to mimic the user’s experience as closely as we could in the snapshot conditions of a ski test.
Now that we categorize skis by their waist width as the primal indicator of their terrain predilections, the “ideal” conditions presumably change with every centimeter of added girth. Any real pretender to the throne of all-terrain mastery should run the gauntlet from boilerplate to bottomless.
The problem is ideal conditions are hard to come by. This thought occurred to me on Wednesday, March 5, as I rode the Jerome Hill Express at Sugar Bowl, California, into a fine mist that obscured every detail of the runs below me.
The occasion that drew me out to ski on snow so sodden and warm it couldn’t be groomed was an off-the-schedule mini trade fair convened by the plucky ranks of Northern California ski reps. I’m sure they wished for different conditions, but these were the conditions we had and they would have to do.
As events transpired, the less-than-perfect snow conditions, which would have horrified those who drafted the DIN standard for ski testing, proved a capable medium for measuring most of a ski’s potential. It also provided an interesting opportunity to see how skis of different widths cope with saturated, sloppy snow.
I sampled skis across the width spectrum, from a sleek, citizen-race GS ski to an über-fat powder sled. While width helped to smear over the morass of rutted tracks, the fatter skis could also feel cumbersome and harder to tilt to a high edge angle.
The last couple of runs of the day, with 26 soupy runs already on the odometer, I took a spin on the aforementioned GS clone. It didn’t deal with the goop like a rockered fatty, plastering over the surface, but like a machete, cutting through it with the confidence of a blade with backbone. Far from finding it overbearing, I found I could relax and let the ski worry about the endless variations in the battered snow.
The lessons of the day were many, including the reminder that just because a ski is narrow doesn’t mean it can’t cut through crud and, conversely, some wide (100mm) skis can carve a mean arc. More importantly, it underscored a basic truth of any ski day: you have to ski the mountain as you find it.
If you approach your ski day with an open heart and an open mind, you’ll discover that any conditions you confront will still be better than a day without skiing.
– Jackson Hogen
