While most of my posts here are devoted to matters pertaining directly to alpine equipment, on occasion I ruminate on why it is we ski in the first place. This is one such reverie. Be reassured I’ll soon be back on the gear beat with nuts-and-bolts previews of...
As the 2014/15 season drew to a close, so did the window in which we test the next year’s crop of new skis, affording us a long view of the year just past and a short glimpse into what the immediate future holds for the alpine ski market. If you break down the...
Few skiers are as zealous as Masters and Citizen racers When the editors at realskiers worked in product development for Salomon in the early 1980’s, extensive consumer research led to the identification of three skier archetypes we’ll call Tourists, Players and...
How Not to Buy a Ski Boot One of Realskiers’ core missions is to recognize and reward excellence in product design. We’ve created a sophisticated protocol to identify the best alpine skis, sorted by terrain preference, skier style and gender. This means we end up with...
Every day of every ski season, well meaning but untrained bootfitters at general sporting goods stores cheerfully guide skiers into the wrong boots. This is not due to any inherent wickedness of 20-something man, but because real mastery takes time to...
The average American skier buys a new ski every 8 to 10 years. (Please don’t tell Donald Trump we alluded to any American as “average.”) For every gear junkie adding to his or her arsenal every other year there’s someone who, as far as the ski industry is concerned,...
