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 order to maintain contact with the ski suppliers whose products I review, and
- I had to spend some quality time on snow, to be sure I was physically, emotionally and mentally prepared to properly evaluate a season’s worth of new skis.
To this end, I just spent three days at Snowbird, going up on the 7:45 tram and pounding down the miles until the distress signals emanating from every muscle in my body pierced the fog of euphoria I experience whenever I’m lucky enough to go and up and down this magnificent mountain. I know that if I can manage my business in its rushing gravity stream, I’m ready for the rigors ski testing.
My preparations were completed just in time, as next week the Mammoth Trade Fair convenes, an annual rite that blends commerce and camaraderie in equal measures. Its immanent appearance on the calendar has inspired me to share with my Dear Readers all the thoughts competing for my mind’s attention in the prelude to the most important event on Realskiers’ calendar.
My top-of-mind concern is one that would never have occurred to me when I began conducting ski tests in 1987, part of an overall strategy of laying the groundwork for Salomon’s first ski, launched just two years later. The looming fear that now forces its way into consciousness takes the form of prayer: Please God, bless the Realskiers Test Card App, that it not fail for any number of mysterious reasons that I neither understand nor know how to fix.
You see, since I abandoned paper test cards – that were immune to technological failure – for a digital format that could go kaput at any time, my greatest fear has been that the app would go sideways just when I most needed it to work. Which, of course, is exactly what it has done on more than one occasion. If I am trepidatious, it’s because I have every reason to be.
Bugs in the technological ointment aren’t the only macro-level threat to capturing ski test data. There’s always the weather, which at Mammoth (as well as Snowbird) has produced a record snowfall. While Mammoth is only a three-hour drive from Reno (where I reside), if a ground blizzard kicks up, it can be many more hours of something closely resembling sheer terror. It was only a few years ago we encountered winds well in excess of 100mph that shut down the whole area, with snowbanks so high there was literally no more space anywhere in town to stash the next snowfall.
Point being, it’s entirely possible we won’t be able to get there, or won’t be able to park anywhere should we get there, or perhaps we won’t be able to leave. All such logistical delights have occurred in recent memory.
But enough of such dreary conjectures: what if the weather breaks in our favor? Suppose we end up with two days of unrelenting powder?
I think you know the answer: we ski the bejesus out of it on every fat ski we can find. Last year produced a bonanza of new Big Mountain models, but hardly a trace of new snow in which to fairly evaluate them. If memory serves, it’s been four years since the Mammoth Trade Fair dates and powder-producing weather were on the same schedule. All we would need is one such day to shore up last year’s results and polish off the entire 2023/24 Powder category (waist widths over 113mm).
It’s a beautiful dream I will cherish until it’s dashed. Should it fail to materialize, I will find solace in testing the Frontside genre, home to the majority of new models for the 23/24 season. If hardpack prevails, I’d also revisit the Technical genre, what remains of the once dominant Carving category.
A Dim View of the Immediate Future
There are two twists to the market the 23/24 models will be entering next fall, factors which have the potential to affect the U.S. ski equipment business. For the first time in memory, the Mammoth Trade Fair will be held after retailers have had to submit their orders for the following fall. This would seem to undermine what had been the foundational idea for an on-snow trade show, to serve as an arena to test new products before committing to buy them.
Probably the largest single factor limiting shop employee attendance at the trade fair isn’t its diminished influence on the buying decision, but the chronic shortage of employees needed to cover the store in a period plagued by understaffing. It’s my hope that shops will nonetheless find a way to send a small delegation, for nothing fuels understanding of how to communicate a ski’s benefits better than actually skiing it.
The other major issue that will hang over all trade fair activities doesn’t involve product testing, but a seismic shift in the market to direct-to-consumer sales. Every major ski maker sells its wares directly to the public, bypassing a dealer network that helped establish the brand’s value over decades of representation. If a shop were to boycott every brand that sold direct, it wouldn’t have any vendors. Dealer/supplier relationships are further strained by early order deadlines coupled with suppliers’ online liquidation of carryover inventory at fire sales prices.
Let me pause here to remind one and all that specialty shops are where you find real bootfitters, without whom skiing with comfort and confidence is well neigh impossible. If you’re looking for the best bootfitters near where you live or ski, please check out Jackson’s List on Realskiers.com. While the primary business of Realskiers.com is helping skiers to find their perfect match in a ski, all efforts at finding a great ski are worthless unless the skier is also well and properly shod.
Trade fairs are the living embodiment of the symbiotic relationship between reps and the ski shops they serve. In a world in which more and more ski sales are siphoned away from the retail channel and sold directly from supplier to consumer, the livelihood of both reps and shops are as endangered as the snowy owl. Currently, the bond between ski shop and ski rep is one of the strongest threads holding the ski industry in the U.S. together.
Whilst noodling for several weeks on where we stand today and where we’ll be tomorrow, I conjured the image of skiing in the rain, one’s goggles overwhelmed by a miasma of fog and smeared raindrops, obscuring anything like a path forward. We’re suffering from a case of commercial vertigo, unsure of our collective bearings. It’s my fervent hope for us all that the fog lifts soon.
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The Making of a Skier, Part IX: The ASTM, Carl Ettlinger and I
One of the many hats I wore as North American binding product manager for Salomon in the early 1980’s was that of delegate to the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). I believe the first meeting of F8.14 – the sub-committee on ski safety – that I attended was in Pennsylvania. I was flying under the wings of Salomon’s seer of all standards and patents, Gilbert Delouche, and the binding product manager for the North American zone at that time (and my mentor), Joe Campisi.
I was a babe in the woods, but I soon caught on to the game under Delouche’s patience guidance. I recall a debate on the binding specification then being batted around in the technical committee chaired by Carl Ettlinger. Ettlinger wanted language that would require any release/retention setting of 10 or above to be “visually distinctive” from the rest of the scale.
In Memorium, Carl Ettlinger
Carl was a giant of a man whose outsized voice roiled every conversation like a burst dam and whose expansive vision reached across the mixed milieus of research, journalism, risk management and education. I knew him when he was at the peak of his powers, as he explained to me when I interviewed him for a “where are they now?” profile in Skiing History. He was able to conduct long-term research on injury patterns as well as analyze the particulars of the current binding market, turn around and package this knowledge into articles for Skiing and Skiing Trade News, followed up by a workshop tour that would bring enlightenment to the grassroots level. No one but Carl could have pulled this off, and Lord knows no one has had the requisite talent, energy and will power since.
But time and tide wait for no man, and Carl’s finely spun web of influence was eventually plucked apart. The loss of his pivotal positions in the press allowed him to slip from public view before we, the skiers of the world, realized we hadn’t taken the time to thank him.
We have the time to thank him now.
So thanks, Carl, for being first and foremost a teacher, for teaching is at the heart of the evangel’s mission.
Thanks for being so damn stubborn. Your insistence on improving skier safety wore through a wall of resistance as tough as Vermont marble.
Thanks for having a heart as big as that melon-sized head of yours. The fuel to your tireless mind was a caring heart that tried to embrace the world.
Thanks for all the stories once the Mount Gay flowed. Who knew we would have won the Vietnam War if only his superiors had listened? I can’t remember exactly how – he wasn’t the only one drinking Mount Gay – but I recall the light in his eyes as he relayed his twisted tales, taking us down successive rabbit-holes of digression that I lost track of at the seventh level.
That’s what I remember most vividly about my many interactions with Carl: his brain so teemed with thoughts he rushed to get them out in a verbal jailbreak that would travel around the cosmos until returning, many lost minutes later, to the subject that had inspired them. That was Carl: too many words for one sentence, too many tasks to tend to and all of it, every erg of his endless energy, devoted to a cause he never ceased to serve.
Fare thee well, Carl Ettlinger. The world misses you already for it will never see another quite like you, whose every moment seemed larger than life itself.
I raise my glass to you, old friend. Mount Gay, of course.
Jackson Hogen
June 23, 2020
Why This Buyer’s Guide?
Don’t read the 2021 Masterfit Buyer’s Guide in Partnership with Realskiers.com for its 62 ski reviews. I should know. I wrote or edited all of them.
Not that the ski reviews aren’t worth the read. But ski reviews on the web are as common as rice, while the Buyer’s Guide contains something no other publication, whether in digital, print or video format, can claim: the most respected, thorough and dependable boot reviews in the world.
This isn’t mere puffery. The Masterfit Boot Test is so well regarded by the supplier community that nearly every brand not only sends its following year’s line-up in four men’s sizes plus three for women, it also dispatches its top designers and/or product managers to a distant North American site for most of the test’s five-day duration.
