If you’ve been a lifelong skier, you’ve not only experienced failure; most likely you’ve survived at least one miscalculation so soul-scarring, its time capsule is enshrined in the halls of memory alongside weddings and funerals.
As inspiration and prod to memory, allow me to recount a vignette from my days as a freestyle competitor. The location is Keystone, Colorado, the event, The Chicken of the Sea Freestyle Classic, a sponsorship coup that couldn’t have been too tough to land as Ralston Purina owned both the resort and the tuna.
I qualified via a preliminary aerial competition, taking a conservative tack by throwing a mule kick, hardly daring when going upside down was common. But my modest move was clean and hung out to dry, with a barely discernible, weightless pause at its apex.
Before getting down to the business of picking favorites, let’s re-examine the fundamental question, what makes a ski a women’s ski?
Not to be flippant, but any ski its maker markets as a women’s model qualifies in that it will come in shorter lengths, which are scaled to match smaller people, a considerable percentage of which are women. To drive this point home, the women’s models will also be decorated in themes deemed – however correctly – to be more appealing to women.
I’m of two minds when it comes to the “best of” business. I realize that many consumers appreciate this shortcut to any further research, take the gold medal as Gospel and act on it. From the designer’s perspective, even though I might make dozens of prototypes, I would still only manufacture one model. From where the ski review purveyor sits, for any given set of criteria, it stands to reason that the ski with highest aggregate score would be the best.
The other side of the coin is that there is no best ski, nor can there be. Within the key All-Mountain categories where most consumers correctly shop, the diversity of on-snow behaviors is astounding. It’s impossible for all these skis to register identically with all the skier types who might consider them. Since there is no one definition of “best,” it’s not possible to identify a single “best” ski for all skiers.
One of the most popular features on Realskiers.com’s member site is our Ski Review Archive, where Recommended ski reviews dating back to 2015 can be easily exhumed and examined. Longtime site subscribers know that this is only a partial collection, that in fact our review archive reaches back to the turn of the millennium.
We’ve been keeping these well-aged scrolls under wraps in part because, like actual ancient documents, the software they were written on (so to speak) has grown old and rickety. There are some serious downsides to continuing to operate obsolete platforms, but to a certain cadre of our readers their contents are as precious as holy relics.
Far West Footloose Sports, Mammoth Lakes, CA (BootDoc) California Ski Company, Berkley CA (Fischer) Gravity Sports, Mt. Bachelor, OR (Pulse) Start Haus, Truckee, CA (Pulse) Sports Creel, Spokane, WA (BootDoc) Whistler, Whistler, BC (BootDoc) Snowwind Sports, Reno, NV...
