Revelations
Your Next Ski, Revisited
For several seasons we’ve been advising women who want the ideal all-purpose ski to focus their search on the category we call All-Mountain East (AME). It’s time we applied the same advice to men. Here’s why. Skis in the AME genre measure between...
Liberty Busts a Move into the Big Leagues
Realskiers regulars who can sense any ripple of change in the site have no doubt noted by now that there’s a new member in the cast of reviewed ski brands, Liberty. As Liberty is the only supplier we cover with an owner/founder/designer as its CEO,...
A Message That Bears Repeating
Boots are more important than skis. In terms of their effect on every aspect of your skiing, boots are at least ten times more valuable than skis. Maybe more. I’m reiterating this primordial bit of advice because our seemingly ever-shrinking sport...
The Skis of the Year, 2018
Ski testing isn’t rocket science. In fact, it’s not any kind of science. It’s a small mountain of subjective opinions from a statistically insignificant population of skiers. Picking any single one as superior to all others in the game is a fun...
The Missing Link
Every elite racer in the world is at the very least checked for it. You can be one of the finest technical skiers extant and feel helpless without it. Sheer talent cannot compensate for its absence. It’s called alignment, and it refers to adjusting...
What Your Boots Are Trying to Tell You
In one of last season’s Revelations (Back to Boot Basics), I wrote: You could make the argument that the purpose of the Alpine boot is to put the skier in this forward-biased position and hold him or her there through thick or thin. Reading these...
A Heart-Wrenching Appeal for Your Support
Look, I know you’re busy and my weekly Revelations don’t always respect that. So allow me to show unusual sensitivity and cut to the chase. I want your money. Not all your money and all the gaudy trappings that go with it, just a snippet; you won’t...
Your Equipment Isn’t Getting Any Younger
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...
Opening Pandora’s Box: The Blizzard of Aahhh’s Turns 30
It isn’t often that a seismic cultural shift can be traced to a single, defining moment, and even more rare that this historic tremor should issue from the world of skiing. Yet on October 16, 1988, a former U.S. National Ballet Champion and...
The Lessons of P-165
Last week I outlined the backstory behind the creation of Tecnica’s Mach 1 collection, a fairly straightforward chronology of how a panel of bootfitters exerted a major influence on product development that continues to this day. The code name for...
P-165
If the title of this 2-part article sounds about as exciting as a paint chip, it’s because that’s what it stands for, a Pantone color code. This is the tale of how such an unassuming moniker became a rallying cry that inspired a remarkably swift...
On Genius
[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...
Can the Pressure to Innovate Warp Time?
Reflections on the Product Lifecycle I recently had occasion to re-enter every one of the 240 ski reviews I penned prior to the 2015/16 ski season, in order to clean up the review archives maintained in Realskiers’ members’ site. It surprised me...
Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex Skiing But Were Afraid to Ask
If you are in receipt of this Revelation, then you’re already aware that Realskiers.com is the most prestigious (and informative) online destination for serious Alpine skiers. A pungent stew of wry insight, occasionally accurate historical...
With a Little Help from My Friends
By most objective measures, Realskiers.com is my web site. I own it. I’ve contributed nearly every word of content for the past five seasons. I’m responsible for the hundreds of ski and boot reviews posted on the site every year. No one else...
Crud, Wet and Beers
The annual Masterfit Boot Test concluded this past Sunday after a 5-day ordeal in which some 35 volunteer testers donned 98 boot models and sallied outside to put them through their paces at Silver Mountain, Idaho. If you’re one of the thousands of...
Back to Boot Basics
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...
A Potpourri of Pungent Opinion
The slender rationale for this week’s Revelation is that most recipients of this weekly trickle of wisdom, rarely, if ever, drop by the mother ship, Realskiers.com, to indulge in Revelations past. I’m just web-savvy enough to realize that if an...
The Best of Times
Every day I get the chance to ski is better than a day I don’t. I may get rained on, pelted with grapple with the density of ball bearings, scorched by winds that would fell a rainforest, feel my legs wobble a half hour into a six-hour day and on...
Lessons in Empathy
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...
Power vs. Finesse
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...
What Makes Specialty Shops Special
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...
On Patience
I composed this piece several years ago in the wake of writing Snowbird Secrets. I’m publishing it now for the first time to bolster the spirits of all those skiers whose patience has been sorely tested while waiting for snowfalls that never...
Slowing the Pace of Model Turnover or No Time Like the Present
For the past few seasons, the intense competition for the high-end ski dollar drove ski makers to maintain a galloping pace of product improvement. Even wildly successful models, such as Rossi’s runaway Big Mountain hit, the Soul 7, underwent...
Ski Test Primer
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...
First Impressions
I just returned Sunday night from the first combined SIA/OR show and I’m still processing all that transpired. In my little corner of the world, the show couldn’t have been any better, but then, trade shows are almost always fertile ground for...
Baselines Basics
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,...
The Special Joys of Flying Solo
I’m not anti-social, but left with the choice of skiing by myself or not skiing at all, I’m going skiing. I suppose part of me, the walled-off writer part, is happily misanthropic, but my skiing self is inherently social. The best ski days are...
How to Be a Good Customer
Thanks to the popularity of rating sites like Yelp™ and Trip Advisor™, every retailer, restaurant and service provider in America is subject to appraisal by its customers. On the whole, this phenomenon is a positive development, even if human...
Does a Ski Possess a Soul?
Can a ski have a soul? Most theologians, as well as the murky dictates of common sense, would say no. But skis do not build themselves. They are the product of human minds and hands and eyes. They are not plucked at random from the universe of...