Revelations
Re-Thinking the Fundamentals
What if you had the chance to start over with a clean slate, not with something as monumental as a relationship - normally too complex to even contemplate - but something with more definable behavioral boundaries, like a ski test card, to choose a...
Advice for Silver Skiers & Other Tidbits
This week’s Revelation is an amalgam of important messages for any skiers looking for new skis and/or boots this year. Its recommendations are tilted in favor of the silver skier set, if only because one new product in particular is heaven-sent...
Snowbird Secrets: On Traverses
Traverses, as the name denotes, cut across the grain of gravity. They are the access points – access bands, actually – to the three giant spirals that radiate from Hidden Peak. They are the paths to adventure, the roads that skirt the edge of the...
The Making of a Skier: Hand-Me Downs
I was the fifth of five children. While I naturally lacked the capacity to appreciate my circumstances in my childhood, the fact that I was an unwelcome accident would cast a shadow across my early youth that only the passage of time and an...
Hiatus
To My Dear Readers and Dear Listeners: No sooner had I posted my (wonderful) podcast with Kim Reichhelm, than I started to feel queasy. In short order I was felled by a respiratory infection that got me in its grip and refused to let go. I won’t...
The Boot-Buying Decision Tree
At the risk of reiterating an axiom with which all skiers should be familiar, your choice of boots is infinitely more important than your choice of skis. Yet most skiers have only the foggiest notion of how to select their ideal boot from the...
Price Is No Object
This Revelation should have been titled, “Price Isn’t the Primary Criterion Anymore,” but that’s not as catchy as “Price Is No Object.” Apologies for any attendant confusion. As consumers, we are trained to shop for the lowest price. The unfettered...
The Con is On!
Earlier this year, I alerted by Dear Readers and Listeners that online advice was about to go from merely shoddy to downright malicious. (See ChatGPT AI Has Ski Patter Down Cold in the Revelations archive on Realskiers.com.) This week, I decided to...
Boots Matter Most
My central message this week is so primordial, so foundational, that it applies to every skier and every shop that hopes to serve them: boots matter most. Anyone remotely interested in skiing safely and comfortably should spend the time and...
Why on Earth am I Doing This?
Why, I do it for you, my Dear Readers and Dear Listeners, so that you might find refuge in the miasma of misinformation that is the Internet, an oasis where experience, knowledge and some measure of sanity prevail. Once upon a time, the mavens of...
All That’s New in 23/24
The ski gear season that lies just ahead of us will, at least superficially, look a lot like the season that just concluded. As I alerted my Dear Readers at this time last year in The Golden Age of Incrementalism, the pace of new ski development is...
The 2022/23 Season in Retrospect
It snowed again in Reno last Monday night, an unnecessary reminder that this season might never end. But while skiing in these parts continues unabated, it’s time for Realskiers to wrap up the current year with a recap of all the Revelations and...
Groundhog Year
So much snow has fallen this season at places like Snowbird and Mammoth, it’s quite possible these resorts (and others in the American West) could remain open until the calendar rolls right into the 23/24 season, without missing a day. While I...
A Fresh Perspective On How to Buy in a Maturing Ski Market
I recently received a brief yet pithy email from an old friend and confrere, Tom Corlett, who posed a seemingly innocent question: “Is there now a real, definable difference in ski performance given the consolidated manufacturing?” Since finding...
The Things We Do for Love, Part II
My longtime ski buddy, Rick Stalker, was given the nickname Rickus-Dickus by fellow Snow Country Magazine ski tester Tina Vindum, an honorific that instantly adhered and has remained intact ever since it was bestowed. (If you ever met the...
The Extraordinarily Gifted Athlete Who Created the Modern Ski Boot
If you own a pair of Alpine ski boots, you are skiing in a product whose origins can be traced directly back to one man, Sven Coomer. There are two dominant strains in Alpine boot DNA, the three-piece, open-throat design, and the two-piece shells...
Ski Luminaries Explain Why You Should Listen to Jackson
The American ski market has never seen so many new and returning skiers in need of good information, yet this critical commodity is currently in short supply. The dearth of authentic print titles leaves skiers to the tender mercies of the Internet,...
The Bottom of the Barrel
While prowling the underbelly of the Internet, I’ve come across all manner of idiotic “Top Ten” gear recommendations, dooming whoever dares believe them to irredeemable misery. Every one of them seems to make its selections by lottery, for they all...
Reflections of a Ski Tester on Trade Fair Eve
Before delving into the nitty-gritty of today’s Revelation, allow me to apologize for having missed a couple of deadlines, but I have a couple of very good excuses: I had to attend the recent reunion of what remains of our national ski show in...
Seven Things We Think You Know
One of the foundational elements of many misunderstandings is cemented in place when one side of a relationship presumes the other is operating at a level of knowledge, vocabulary and general awareness that they do not, in fact, possess. No one...
Stymied
We skiers are a resilient lot. We have to be. The sport that feels embedded in the most elemental fibers of our being requires winter. I realize that last statement isn’t entirely true, but anyone who mistakes indoor skiing or sliding on sand or...
Another Reason to Get New Boots
Please note that I’m going to intersperse my narrative with comments from real skiers either uttered from the boot bench or sent to me at Realskiers.com. The best reason to get new boots (sooner rather than later) is that your old ones either...
On Being Early
There are few things in skiing that work quite as well as being early. Every powder addict in the world knows the advantage of being early to the lift line or on the first tram, for these are the only ways to assure first tracks. While there’s no...
Skier, Know Thy Feet
Wherever there’s snow on the ground, the frenzy has started. Last season, the U.S. ski market hit high-water marks in every metric, and this vast horde of skiers, be they recent converts or grizzled veterans, can’t wait to get back on snow. A large...
Enlightened Self-Interest Explained
One of the principal benefits of membership in Realskiers.com is the right to correspond with yours truly one-on-one, that I might address and ultimately resolve your most urgent, ski-related issues. As skiing, in my view, reaches into all aspects...
Seven Skis That Transcend Their Genres
Ever since Doug Pfeiffer and Sven Coomer orchestrated Skiing magazine’s first on-snow ski test, how to usefully categorize the pile of models under review has been an on-going debate. For many years, SKI magazine defined each category according to...
How It’s Supposed to Work
I’ve recently returned to the front lines - known colloquially as the bootfit bench - as there’s snow on the ground here in Reno and the frenzy has started. As usual, every encounter with live subjects reveals a trove of knowledge, or perhaps I...
Are You Ready?
It snowed in Reno last night. There’s nothing like waking to a fresh blanket of snow draped over every inch of the landscape to kick-start the dormant machinery that monitors one’s skiing life. You probably took care of the season pass issue so...
Another Brilliant Idea I Don’t Like
Maybe it’s because I’ve spent what feels like several days in the clutches of AT&T customer service, a stretch of unrelieved aggravation that would roil the implacable calm of the Buddha, but the latest new product announcement to arrive in my...
Readers Respond to Revelation On Fear of High Lifts
Four weeks ago, I posted a Revelation and attendant podcast titled, “Fear of Flying.” In it, I divulged that I have developed a syndrome that it turns out is not all that uncommon, at least among skiers old enough for membership in AARP. Several...