Over the last several seasons, the brawniest skis in the Women’s All-Mountain West genre have been mellowing out. Gone are the models that simply replicate a carving construction in a fatter profile; today’s WAMW models are unequivocally off-piste appliances. The ones...
The original idea behind making a ski as fat as 110mm underfoot wasn’t to open previously unskiable terrain to world-class athletes, but to allow those without such skills to be able to navigate less forbidding pitches when the snow is knee deep. Our Finesse Favorites...
The defining difference between our Power Picks and Finesse Favorites can be summed up succinctly: how fast are you willing to go before you steer out of the fall line? If you tend to ride the brakes and the gas at the same time, you’ve overshot your category: you...
The women’s Big Mountain genre has bedeviled us since we began covering these super-fat models as a separate category six seasons ago. Part of the problem is that skis this wide require some semblance of new snow to be given a fair evaluation, limiting their appeal as...
The fattest of the fatties (>113mm) are true specialty sticks, meant for when the snow is so deep even a 108mm won’t float high enough. This reality won’t keep some folks from sporting them every day, but this is lunatic-fringe behavior as hauling a barge around on...
