Revelations
What Matters Most about Your Boots
At the beginning of every new season it’s appropriate to revisit some fundamental issues that bedevil the ski equipment selection process. If there’s one point upon which all equipment gurus agree, it’s that the most critical piece of the equipment...
What Matters and What Doesn’t – Skis
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...
How to Judge a Boot Fit
Whenever a bootfitter slips what he or she knows to be the correct size onto a prospective customer's foot, it's standard procedure to intone, "You will feel your toes at the end of the boot; please try not to panic," or some such admonition. This...
Expand Your Sphere of Awareness, Please!
Expert skiers don’t worry about falling. But they do worry about collision. A lot. As in, all the time. Collisions hurt. Falling down a steep mogul slope, while terrifying at the time, mostly injures one’s pride; colliding with another speeding...
Why Haven’t Better Skis Produced Better Skiers?
When I orchestrated equipment reviews for Snow Country Magazine 25 years ago, all skis looked similar but the quality of the on-snow experience was all over the map. Today skis come in a wild array of widths, sidecuts and baselines that impart all...
Buying on a Budget — Stretching Your Ski Equipment Dollar
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...
The Five Fallacies
Most skiers who aren’t professionally involved with the sport cling to any number of misconceptions about equipment and technique. Just how some of these fallacies came to be embedded in the skiing public’s zeitgeist is unclear, but friends and...
A Brief Explanation of Why Skiers are Better Than Everyone Else
Skiers are among the finest human beings on our precious planet, which this short essay makes abundantly clear. I composed this meditation on why skiers are better than everyone else several years ago. If you’re reading this, please know that I...
The Eternal Stickiness of Skiing
While most of my posts on realskiers 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. I shall return in short order to nuts-and-bolts previews...
Let There Be Light
A Preview of What’s New for 2016 While major ski brands continue fighting fiercely to differentiate themselves, there’s one theme that pops up at some point in every company’s presentation of a 2016 collection: lighter is better. In years past, the...
Best All-Mountain Skis of 2015
The defining trait of an “all-mountain” ski is versatility, a talent for adapting to any condition from brittle hardpack to tracked-up trees to fluffy freshies. The ideal all-terrain ski is ready for whatever is on the mountain’s menu that...
Skis of the Year 2015
What a wonderful time to be a skier. No matter where or how you like to slide, there is a ski made just for you; the ski market has never displayed so much diversity in shapes and baselines, from hourglass carvers to battleship-wide smear-sticks. ...
Demo Delusions
As I pen this piece, two events of singular importance to the ski industry are unfolding a few miles apart at either end of Vail Pass: the 2015 Alpine World Championships debut in Vail/Beaver Creek while the national Snowsports Industries...
The Definition of “Fit”
This week’s post is an exchange between a realskiers subscriber (whom we'll call Kate) writing in response to a recent Revelation, Helpful Fictions, and our Editor. She found it so useful she suggested we pass it on to our readers. We concur and...
The Case for Ski Testing
At the risk of occasionally re-stating the obvious and often repeating points made previously by various ski industry savants, I want to revisit the merits and demerits of ski testing generally and expertskiers’ methodology specifically. The...
On Vibrations
At realskiers we focus our energies on equipment, but skiing isn’t about the stuff; it’s what you do with the stuff that matters. To ring in the New Year on the right note, the first post of 2015 is an abbreviated version of one of the chapters in...
The Tipping Point, Or, You Can’t Get There From Here
There’s a folk tale about a native Vermonter that begins with a lost tourist asking for directions and ends with the native's curt advice: You cain’t git they-ah from he-ah. Expert skiers who have mastered a measure of technique yet still...
Is Your Gear Limiting Your Development?
Most Americans believe in self-improvement, that regardless of the chosen endeavor, one should strive to get better at it. As applied to skiing, this world-view implies that all skiers, from rank beginner to elite competitor, would like to ski...
On Gifts
This week’s entry, On Gifts, is a meditation on those special moments in skiing that seem magically bestowed. People are weird. Everyone thinks that he or she is superb at something, even if that something should happen to be monumentally trivial....
Why Ski Lessons Should be Free
At realskiers, we emphasize the connection between technique and equipment, as the two elements are inextricably intertwined. Skiers who learn to tip and pressure a ski can apply this skill set to all sorts of terrain, opening up their gear...
Ski of the Year 2014
As a ski test editor for realskiers.com, I’m expected to name my Ski of the Year, the sure-fire, can’t-miss, only-an-idiot-wouldn’t-love-it best ski money can buy. Not wishing to disappoint my public, I have dutifully done so. But I did so in...
Labor Day Ski Sales
Our jocular Editor doing field research at a sale If you are a real skier, you suffer from a chronic condition caused by the Gottaski Virus. One of the only forms of relief available in the late summer is attendance at a well-stocked Labor Day ski...
Hey America, Where are you Hiking?
I suppose if you’re part of a publicly held company, your brand has an obligation to pursue every possible profit opportunity. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so a market niche attracts the maximum number of entrants. This phenomenon helps explain...
Everybody Wants a Deal
Everybody wants a deal. So here’s the deal: instead of using the Internet’s attributes to search for price, you should be using it to search for service. (Think Angie’s List™ for skier services.) We don’t say this because we’re one-percenters...
Why 98mm-Waisted Skis Rule the All-Mountain Category
Ours is an era of unrivaled specialization in the ski department. On top of the already dizzying profusion of race models (that the public rarely sees) are fully populated genres that pop up every time the ski waist expands by a centimeter, not to...
Carpe Skiem
A talented boot fitter is a terrible thing to waste. Now is the time. Not to go skiing, but to prepare for frolics to come. Most skiers wait until the last possible moment to rediscover that the boots that caused so much distress last season are...
What Makes a Great Ski Great?
One bedrock principle of marketing is to draw public attention to your product’s differentiating feature that delivers a performance, comfort or convenience advantage over the competition. To reach the widest audience, the communication has to be...
Are You Ready to Ski?
[The process of evaluating next season’s crop of new models begins in earnest this month, inspiring this rumination.] It’s axiomatic that if you don’t know how to ski it really doesn’t matter what model ski you use as long as it’s sized properly....
Are Today’s Boots Any Better?
Last Saturday a customer of my generation was perched on the boot bench at Bobo's enduring a somewhat frustrating fitting session - his first in many years - when he opined aloud that it didn’t seem like boots had changed much since last he’d...
The Lessons of 2014
The first week of spring seems a propitious moment to look back on the lessons we learned from our stewardship of realskiers.com over the past season. 2014 was a watershed year for realskiers, as the Editor’s pen was passed from founder Peter...