2024 Salomon Stance 96

Last winter I was able to ski all the new Stances from Salomon on several occasions, from a foot of fresh to manicured corduroy.  More by accident than design, I even skied them with two different boots. The more I skied them, the more I was led to a conclusion that, at first, I didn’t quite believe: they all ski remarkably alike. That may sound like a particularly unremarkable observation: if they’re all built the same way, why shouldn’t they ski alike?  Fair enough, but it’s rarely the case that all members of a product family ski identically, and in the case of the new Stances, they don’t just ski kinda like their siblings: any two adjacent widths are all but indistinguishable on the snow, particularly in the off-trail conditions they were made for. The obvious implication of this interchangeability is that the middle-of-the-range, All-Mountain West Stance 96 not only exhibits the same quickness to the edge as the All-Mountain East Stance 90 displays on a groomer, it also mimics the Big Mountain Stance 102’s Finesse properties in broken powder. That’s a great thumbnail description of what one hopes to find in any All-Mountain West model.  Skiers who want to smash through crud at max velocity have plenty of other options; the Stance 96 is more for the technician than the daredevil. It doesn’t rush through the turn, nor does it explode off the edge; its talent is for maintaining contact on a secure platform that adapts to terrain rather than trying to subdue it. Its defining trait is its predictability, moving confidently from turn to turn whether the snow surface is perfectly manicured or a hot mess that’s never seen a grooming machine.