Start a string of slalom turns and the GT 80 Ti shines brighter with every arc. As it picks up speed the ski becomes more energetic, moving from edge to edge with quiet assurance. The GT 80 Ti is an edge angle agnostic, willing to respond to a skier with an upright stance but ever ready to get down to business if the skier starts to lay it over. Pretty, powerful turns are second nature.
If you take its integrated bindings out of the equation, the XDR 84 Ti would only weigh 1,620g at 170cm, which is not a lot for any ski and really featherweight for a Frontside model. That it still holds a solid edge on hard snow is testament to how well C/FX helps dampen vibration without the added heft of metal. One advantage of lighter weight is the ski automatically feels quicker, able to flip from one edge to the other on a whim.
Skiing the Stöckli Laser AX is an experience unlike any other. A lot of skis in this genre, particularly among our Power Picks, borrow from race room technology; the Laser AX skis like it is a race ski, only wider. It seems to beg the skier to go a little faster, find a little more speed at the top of the turn, hold a little cleaner arc at the bottom, be fearless. It wants you to go faster if only to prove that it will remain utterly composed, cutting deep into hard snow as if were trying to make it bleed.
Rossi declines its Experience/Temptation series, which is marketing babble for presenting a hierarchy driven by a relationship between price and performance. The Temptation 84 HD is a step off the pinnacle of the women’s product pyramid, so it isn’t geared to impress experts but to coddle intermediates. The un-tapered sidecut is made to maintain continuous edge contact, the Grail of on-trail technique. With its new HD embellishment, the Temptation 84 has the stuffing to withstand the buffeting inherent in off-trail travel, but it still prefers to engage its tidy, 13m sidecut (162cm) on more consistent terrain.
The reason the Stormrider 83 can hold its own against a field of skis designed expressly for the Frontside milieu is because it’s a typically rich, metal-laden, Stöckli construction that wasn’t built to caress the snow but to subjugate it. It doesn’t have to change its normal behavior just because the snow under its bases switches from fluffy to firm.