Neither the Quest Access W family nor our 2016 assessment of its virtues have changed; while this commentary is a repost of last season’s report, the associated FIND buttons connect to 2017 starting inventory.
We hope the main reason Salomon created the Quest Access line was so they could switch the cuffs and co-create a parallel collection for women. The advent last season of the Quest Access Custom Heat W ($549), gave women with chronically cold tootsies a reason to keep on skiing. Generally speaking, women are more likely to have some circulatory impingement that results in cold extremities. They’d have to swing their feet in a centrifuge to warm them up with blood flow. Now with Custom Heat they can just flip a switch and say, “Ahhhh…”
Women with high ambitions should remember that the Quest Access is built on a big-bodied, 104mm last. “Accurate” and “precise” aren’t adjectives that spring to mind. (There’s an X Pro Custom Heat W now for the more skilled skier.) The top two models are labeled with an 80 flex index, but the walk mode switch on the spine is a tip-off that they’ll be “soft” 80-flex boots, and the other boots in the Quest Access family will be softer still.