Blizzard could not possibly have foreseen how a funky collection of freeride skis, curiously named after rodeo bulls, would virtually transform its brand. For one thing, Blizzard was, then as now, firmly planted in the center of Austrian ski country, where the national obsession is World Cup racing. Making what would become perhaps the most dominant collection of off-trail models ever concocted wasn’t on the to-do list. To that point, no Austrian brand, including Blizzard,
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We live in difficult times. I’m not referring to the messes mankind is making on every macro level, but the state of affairs within the tiny, cloistered domain of the ski maker. In a financial marketplace that demands growth as the measure of success, squeezing more money out of an ever-shrinking world ski market requires constant innovation just to maintain sales volume. The need to shave R&D costs has shrunk the product development cycle down
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I quit my dream job because of a dream. I was staying at the Hotel Lenado in Aspen, escorted by my lovely bride Stephanie, over a March weekend in 1987. The occasion was the men’s FIS downhill, which happened to tuck neatly into the calendar just before the annual SIA show in Las Vegas. My wingmen that weekend were Scooter Libby, George Benkendorf – a retired airline pilot and gifted sybarite – and my dear
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During ski season I work a few days almost every week fitting boots at Bobo’s, which affords me the opportunity to interact with a broad swath of the skiing public. Bobo’s is a specialty shop but not a specialized shop: we supply every stratum of skier with an overabundance of options. I would be surprised if Bobo’s weren’t among the top ten independent, single-location ski retailers in America. Point being, I see a healthy cross-section
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A rock impresario who happens to be a dear friend of mine ascribes the secret of success to “timing and lighting.” That’s an apt aphorism for my office career at Salomon in the early 1980’s: I was in the right place at the right time, for nothing creates opportunity like chaos. Just as I was settling into my new duties as Educational Services Administrator, the lowest possible clerical rung on the ladder to success, the
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[On Drifting is Chapter 14 of Snowbird Secrets, A Guide to Big Mountain Skiing, which I co-wrote with “Guru” Dave Powers during the summer of 2012. Each chapter is a stand-alone meditation on some aspect of skiing that illuminates and informs the rest of our lives. It makes a lovely holiday gift that reflects well on your keen discernment and quality upbringing.] On Drifting While the concept of carving has been around for as long
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For some of my faithful following, the suggestion made by this Revelation’s 3-word title (ecclesiastics are fond things that come in threes) will be sufficient to inspire the desired behavior. As I notice the rest of you are continuing to read, allow me to lay the argument for this case before you. Done properly, bootfitting is not a slam-dunk affair. It needn’t drag on for hours, either, but to be effective, selecting and fitting a
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Powder skis represent the triumph of optimism over the dictates of reason. There’s only one reason to own a Powder ski, and it’s in the name. If you don’t anticipate catching a fresh snowfall of two feet or more, you don’t need a Powder model, which in Realskiers terms means a ski over 113mm wide underfoot. Realistically, how many mega-dumps are you going to experience in a given winter? I realize you dream of having
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Once a skier finds a great fitting boot, it can be very hard to let it go. I’ve seen boots manufactured during the Reagan administration tenderly pulled from their neon (and somehow still pristine) boot bag by their besotted owner in the hope that I can somehow breathe life back into them. Somewhere during the history lesson that often accompanies this moment, the suggestion is made that perhaps replacing the liners will extend their useful
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Realskiers.com Receives Prestigious Award! Realskiers.com Wins First Stump-Bertoni Prize In a stunning upset that has shaken the very foundations of the sports media world, Realskiers.com has been awarded the first Stump-Bertoni Prize for Excellence. The precise nature of the excellence being recognized is deliberately vague, according to award co-creator David Bertoni, which he claims both reflects the quantum nature of human experience and allows the scope of the Stump-Bertoni Prize to inflate as necessary to
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Once they were kings. After a relatively short incubation period in the early 1990’s, shaped skis suddenly overran the worldwide ski market, effectively ending the reign of long, skinny skis by the second half of that pivotal decade. When I attended ISPO in 1996, Intersport, the buying colossus that was used to dictating its own commercial terms, informed its ski suppliers that it henceforth wanted each ski indelibly marked with the “Carve” category to which
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In years of yore, I would use this space to promote the models that I personally preferred in each unisex genre. (Women’s views prevailed in the domain of the fairer sex.) This year I saw no reason to deviate from the wisdom of my beloved test team, who unerringly selected la crème de la crème of each category. Please note that there are too few Women’s Powder models to constitute a category and none whatsoever
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In 1993, there were 25 models of reputedly made-for-women skis entered in the Snow Country Magazine ski test. They were classified as “recreational,” but a more accurate adjective would have been “dreadful.” Not a single brand of the 18 represented was aiming at anyone above average ability. Our elite test crew regarded them with unvarnished contempt. The reason no one tried to concoct a decent women’s model was the prevailing attitude among ski makers that
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Much as I loathe the idea of contributing to the demise of my native tongue, I hereby bow before the Zeitgeist of brevity. For those whose reading habits consist of a diet of small doses, behold the conclusions of my two-part examination of the current women’s ski market, delivered in the modern idiom of the bullet-point list: The wider the ski, the fewer the distinctions between a men’s model a women’s model. The women’s models
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I don’t know how many Non-FIS Race skis will be sold during the many Race Nights that will most likely convene sometime this month, but I have a fair idea of how many will move off retail racks during the rest of the season: next to none. Aside from the race community, practically nobody wants a race ski anymore. In light of the fact that race skis were once the only option for elite skiers,
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My first winter season as a Salomon rep was winding down when our Binding Product Manager, Joe Campisi, asked me to script a promotional video for use on the following year’s certification circuit. I promptly produced a draft that Campisi passed along to John Creel, head of Salomon’s ad agency. Word came back that the draft would need a little work, but not to worry, I’d have plenty of time on the flight to Geneva
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I was an experiment. Clay Freeman, Salomon’s Western Sales Manager, and Tom Corlett, the Colorado Front Range rep who would soon assume Freeman’s mantle, met me in the United Airlines lounge at Stapleton Airport to offer the newly created position of Service Representative. I was hired, at the princely sum of $9600 per annum, to support three sales territories by performing all their binding certification clinics, thereby freeing the associated salesmen to extract yet another
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In Part I of my 2020 State of the Ski Market Revelation, I describe how the influence of ski width, deep sidecuts, rockered baselines and tapered tips and tails have dumbed down skis to the point where skills development is treated as optional. The crowning achievement of the modern ski is that it has allowed the absence of technique to become a technique. This week’s sermon begins with a brief dissertation on a different way
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Once upon a time, the Alpine ski market was relatively homogenous. Racing was the sole paradigm of excellence and race ski clones populated every product line. Everyone’s collection put race skis on a pedestal, made lower-cost spin-offs for the masses in the middle of the market and offered a huge menu of entry-level package skis. Today’s market could not look much more different. Entry-level package skis still exist, but their ranks have thinned considerably. The
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In his introduction to an overview of current research on the effects of wide skis, Prof. John Seifert of Montana State University explains two fundamental ways that wide skis expose the knee to injury. (We’ll get into the mysteries of just how wide is “wide” and other variables in a minute.) The first of the Big Fundamentals is that wide skis force skiers to adopt a more upright stance. Less bend at the knee means
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The annual rite of spring known as America’s Best Bootfitters Boot Test attracts some of the world’s top product development talent. Last year I was third fiddle in a conversation between two very highly regarded members of this elite talent pool. I don’t know how the conversation veered into ski test results, but that’s what was being batted about when the following exchange occurred. (I won’t use quotes as I’m culling the gist from the
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On those rare occasions when I leave my writer’s cocoon to engage in some form of social interaction, I’m often introduced as being somehow involved with the ski racket. When asked to clarify my ski connection, I confess to practicing a strange craft known only to the cult that follows such things as “ski journalism.” On a 1-to-10 scale of conversational encouragement, I’d rate my response as a 1, or very nearly content-free. And so
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Regular readers of my Revelations know that my primary communication vehicle is the printed word, which I try to conjure and arrange as artfully as I can with the entwined intent of entertaining and educating. While my goals remain the same as ever, the teaching this week shall be delivered by the most popular of modern media, video. In the furnace of my imagination, the few emails I received that wondered whither my video content
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A pivotal moment in any ski or boot sale comes when the customer provides a thumbnail portrait of his or her abilities and ambitions. This self-appraisal determines the direction the salesperson is going to take to zero in on the customer’s perfect ski (or boot). The clearer the picture the prospective buyer can paint, the more accurately the sales advisor can match skier to ski. If only life were so simple. The problem is that
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When I graduated from Yale in June of 1972, I had little idea of who I was and no idea whatsoever how I was supposed to spend the remainder of my time on earth. My degree was in Philosophy, where I sought to untie the knottiest problems. This no doubt enriched my life in many ways, but it was not what I would describe as a fast track to related employment. As trained philosophers should,
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False modesty does not become me, so I’ll just say it: it was the best ski test, ever. Instead of running for barely a week, it churned non-stop for more than three weeks. But it wasn’t just long; it was also deep. Just the local talent pool was insane: Tamara McKinney, Wayne Wong, Eva Twardokens, Susan Chappell, Bill Hudson, Tina Vindum, Barry Thys, Erica Standteiner, Cameron Boyle, Kevin Andrews, Stu Campbell, Todd Kelly, Kristin Lignell,
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[In fond memory of many joyful Christmas vacations in the home my parents built in the mountains, where they were happiest. Merry Christmas to all my Dear Readers at Realskiers.] It’s no longer regarded as insightful to observe that memories are not only fallible, but often constructed from scratch by the recollector’s imagination. Memory is further distorted when the distant events are culled from fragments originally recorded by a 7-year old mind trying to decipher
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Yesterday morning the 2019 Masterfit Buyer’s Guide was posted on digital platforms across the Internet. A collaboration between Masterfit and Realskiers, the Masterfit Buyer’s Guide blends the instant availability of a digital publication with the sort of in-depth advice that once formed the backbone of print buyer’s guides. Of course the Masterfit Buyer’s Guide is also loaded with ski and boot reviews based on the on-snow evaluations of dozens of veteran testers. This week’s Revelation
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As the Pontiff of Powder, I have a sacrosanct duty to bestow spiritual enrichment upon my flock. The spirit guide I have co-authored for this express purpose is Snowbird Secrets, from which On Sensuality has been excerpted. While it is a fallacy to believe, as some overly zealous converts do, that mere ownership of a copy assures a peaceful afterlife, it can’t hurt. It’s like getting a good recommendation letter: it doesn’t guarantee you’ll get
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Dear Readers: I subscribe to exactly one blogger, Bob Lefsetz, whose passion is the music scene, but his restless mind and flowing prose are by no means confined to this subject. Lefsetz’s second love is skiing, a topic to which he often strays in winter months. In a blog post dated November 28 – he frequently posts several times a week – he wrote a burst of sentences that caught my eye: “And Killington got
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Aging is a bitch. Nothing and no one is immune from its predations. I mention this not to impress you with the depth of my insights (the likes of which are unavailable elsewhere), but because we humans have a tendency to hope some things will last forever, or if not forever, at least as long as we will. A corollary to this inescapable reality is that some of the stuff we own is quite a
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[After writing Snowbird Secrets, I composed a series of meditations that attempted to dissect its origins. On Genius is from this series. I realize its relevance to skiing is oblique; I offer it here to keep your minds engaged while I research a few of the technical articles I’m composing for your future delectation. This piece is for all the angels who have helped me give voice to my thoughts.] We have a tendency, in
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If you are reading this Revelation on the day of its issue, then I am en route to Silver Mountain, Idaho to assess the state of affairs in the 2018/19 Alpine boot market. The occasion is Masterfit’s America’s Best Bootfitters annual Boot Test, the most respected, most authoritative and most widely disseminated exploration of what will be available to skiers next fall. As someone who has conducted or contributed to equipment tests for over three
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Last Sunday I concluded another season of bootfitting at Bobo’s Ski and Board in Reno. As a city shop loosely associated with the local ski area, Mt. Rose, and closely aligned with Sky Tavern, a city-owned facility that tries to make skiing affordable for the less affluent, Bobo’s attends to the needs of the entire spectrum of skiers, from never-evers to skiing royalty. Inevitably, they will all end up sitting on the boot bench, some
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Skiers are not a homogenous lot. The ski community includes Nordic jumpers, runners and biathletes alongside pipe and park denizens, co-mingled with backcountry enthusiasts, some of whom race up the mountain instead of down it. All of these activities require highly specialized gear. This brief treatise isn’t about any of these sub-cultures, but a primordial schism within the ranks of Alpine, resort-based skiers. My daily encounters with the ski-seeking public – both online and in
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Regular readers of my weekly Revelations are frequently reminded of the importance of supporting your local specialty ski shop. There are countless reasons for doing so, not least of which is that it’s in your best interests. This week’s tale shines a light on why patronizing your local shop matters more than you think. The big picture focus of this piece is on the power of community, but the details derive from a very singular
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Ski testing closely resembles skiing, but it’s not the same. Ski testing requires discipline. The ski tester has to reign in the natural impulse to ski the mountain as an ever-changing amusement park, instead taking the same path over and over. On a free ski run, the same skier might drop the reins and let the skis find the fall line; when testing, low speeds and short turns also must be given their due. What
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You’re first attracted by a ski’s topskin, how it appears in the hand. But you live with the base, where the ski meets the snow. Of all the clues to performance that can be gleaned by examining a pair of new skis plucked off the ski shop wall, perhaps the most significant reside in the ski’s baseline. In the olden days – i.e., over ten years ago – there wasn’t a lot of discussion about
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According to the recently released SIA Market Intelligence Report, the Key Insight to be gleaned from the Alpine Ski Participant Age Trends is, “As a percentage of Alpine Skiers, the 45-54 and 55-64 age groups grew.” Actually, so did the 65+ age group, although to a considerably lesser degree, which suggests that some concatenation of factors causes senior participation to fall off after what we were raised to believe was “retirement age.” Why would senior
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Last season I introduced a Realskiers Test Card app, allowing both our regular cast of specialty shop personnel and citizens of all stripes to record their impressions of new skis and send them off to my database in one fell swoop. The app turned out to be a lifesaver, as test venue after test venue was wiped out by wind and weather, drastically shrinking the number of paper cards that would be submitted after regional
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The ecology that allows the ski bum to flourish has always been delicate. In order to survive, the ski bum often is forced to live in communal households with half-crazed roommates (which is better than it sounds) with dubious hygiene (worse than it sounds). In his most primitive state, diet consists largely of free bar food and what nutrients can be culled from uncleared lunch trays. Improving on these conditions requires working, which interferes with
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[For the last two weeks we’ve been investigating the women’s ski market. In this, our third and final installment, we look at two different directions open to advanced women who have outgrown what’s available in the women’s Frontside genre.] We open our closing rumination on women’s skis with a brief inspection of a category virtually invisible to the U.S. market yet important enough worldwide to merit women-specific constructions. The women’s Technical genre, like its unisex
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[In the first part of our exploration of the current women’s market we cited the influence of the backcountry market and the Lighter is Better trend on women’s ski design in general and the Big Mountain genre in particular. This week we look at how a selection of major brands have addressed the women-specific market in the far more significant Frontside and All-Mountain East genres.] Before taking a deep dive into the details of how
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It seems like only yesterday, but it was, in fact, seven years ago that the tiny corner of the national sporting press devoted to alpine ski coverage revealed a tantalizing tidbit: Lindsey Vonn, the star of the U.S. team and reigning World Cup Overall champion, was switching to men’s skis! That a woman as big, strong and fearless as Lindsey would opt to compete on men’s skis seemed both brazenly audacious and entirely plausible. It
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I can already feel the headwinds of protest this pensée is likely to engender, so to mitigate their ferocity, allow me to open with these caveats: I’m not against people taking electronic gadgetry to the slopes. On the contrary, I’ve created an app for ski testers to record their results, a gadget if there ever was one. I’m all for apps that help people extract more enjoyment from their ski day or serve some safety
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Buying alpine ski boots has never been a picnic. It isn’t going to get any easier, at least not in the near term. I’ve just returned from 5 days of intensive on-snow boot evaluation at the MasterFit Boot Test, conducted on the wintery slopes of Bachelor Mountain. Sixteen boot brands were represented, covering categories from Frontside to Backcountry. Dozens of testers willingly buckled themselves into every manner of boot and sallied forth to essay them.
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At Realskiers.com, we consider it axiomatic that skiers should entrust boot model selection to a competent boot fitter, rather than trying to negotiate the labyrinth of the current market in hopes of unearthing the magic slipper that will provide the elusive perfect fit. The hunt for the ideal boot is analogous to the search for health care; the skier who wants the best care should be looking for the right doctor, instead of researching prescription
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Regular readers of these Revelations are aware that I routinely spend my winter weekends diagnosing and remedying multifarious bootfitting woes. Sessions with problematic feet may easily run over an hour, affording me the opportunity to hear countless confessions from afflicted skiers. Perhaps the most common remark volunteered by owners of ten-year-old boots that felt good for the first and last time the day they were purchased is something along the lines of, “I wonder why
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Everybody loves to demo new skis. When most skiers try out a new model, they just go skiing and see if they like it. They may lack the vocabulary to describe precisely what they prefer and what they loathe, but they can easily distinguish between being happy and being miserable. Realskiers.com readers tend to be more analytical, striving to think their way to an optimal solution. They want to understand all they can about the
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When I was cutting my teeth in the ski trade in the late ‘70’s, the market was built like a classic pyramid: the broad base was composed of a large population of entry-level skis, sold mostly in packages; the next level of intermediate/advanced products didn’t add up to as many units but remained a relatively large percentage of the total; capped by a small contingent of mostly race models for experts, instructors and actual racers.
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This week, I share some Realskiers.com subscriber perspectives I found instructive, on pedicures, gloves and proper ski size selection, with my responses appended. One word: pedicure! I may have “discovered” something that can benefit all skiers! There is no question for me as to the benefits of proper bootfitting. Yet in all I’ve read there hasn’t been a mention of good foot hygiene let alone the value of a pedicure. I think I am on
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“Lighter is better” (LIB) has been the dominant theme in consumer products over the past several years, so it’s no surprise that ski makers have adopted this mantra as their own. What is somewhat of a surprise is that the LIB philosophy has permeated all recreational ski categories, affecting both men’s and women’s models. The global emphasis on weight reduction across the gender divide has had the net effect of making men’s models more similar
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Aging isn’t for the faint of heart. It takes fortitude to slide out of bed when every sinew seems to have ossified overnight. The silver-haired who continue to ski into their dotage manage to do so not because they’ve found the Fountain of Youth, but because they’re able to suppress or ignore the body’s daily attempts to signal for a time out. It’s as if your skiing self were a dim-witted game show contestant who
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Last week’s Revelation, “Take the Leap of Faith” inspired some thoughtful critiques among the Realskiers faithful, both on our Facebook page and in one-on-one correspondence with yours truly. One perspicuous soul correctly observed that said essay was superficial, while another waxed eloquent on why the ski industry should adopt saner, customer-centric practices that mimicked regular shoe buying. In my meandering reply to this critic, I noted that if the customer takes charge of the sale,
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When considering which ski is right for you, don’t just compare thumbnail model descriptions, helpful though they might be. Don’t put all your faith in numbers either, even though statistics exude the aroma of science. Take stock in the advice of family and friends, if you must, but I wouldn’t invest too heavily in the opinion of those whose experience has been largely limited to one ski. Before you take the final plunge, learn what
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An alarming number of skiers assume that ski boots hurt, period. Every boot they ever put on, beginning with rental boots, then their first pair of boots bought as part of an entry-level package and even the next pair of supposedly better boots, all hurt like hell. This “understanding” is what fuels the average boot buyer to be more circumspect about his or her next purchase, vowing to take charge of the sale and not
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In another sentence or two, we’re going to inform you that what ski brand you buy isn’t very important. We want to caution you in advance that this statement isn’t entirely true. It does indeed matter what brand you buy; it just doesn’t matter as much as a few other factors that need to be settled first. To help explain why brand considerations are tertiary territory, let us present a brief summary of how major
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[I composed this meditation on why skiers are better than everyone else several years ago. The eternal verities it expresses strike me as an appropriate inauguration of a new year of content at Realskiers. If you’re reading this, please know that I appreciate your support to the bottom of my heart and hope you enjoy the best runs of your life in the year ahead. Happy New Year! – Jackson] Skiers suffer. We endure countless
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The Pontiff Pontificates On Parsimony Skiing has many charms, but being cheap isn’t one of them. Only the likes of princes and pashas can indulge in the sport with a blind eye to its costs. Everyone else is faced with making choices, such as whether to buy a piece of new gear or a season’s pass, or if both, resigning oneself to a winter of living on ramen. The purpose of this piece is to
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