Just because a ski has a sidecut suitable for carving doesn’t mean it must be pigeonholed as a groomer-only ski, any more than having a mustache means you’re a cad and a bounder. Presented with a foot of fresh powder, the E 88 HD doesn’t realize it’s not supposed to be particularly good at navigating freshies and dives into the fluff without hesitation or a hiccup. It doesn’t flinch when crossing old tracks and if it gets to go first, all the better.
For 2018 Rossi gave the Temptation 88 the HD treatment, adding its Carbon Alloy Matrix – a weave of carbon, glass and basalt – to the ski, bringing it up to par with its unisex wingman, the Experience 88 HD. This means the new Temptation 88 HD has more bite on hard snow, more energy off the edge and more stability at speed than its earlier incarnation. As was the case with the Experience 88, the HD upgrade raised the performance range of the Temptation 88 by several notches.
If the EXP 100 HD sounds like an over-sized carving ski, well, it is. Most of the skis in the All-Mountain West genre reside near the middle of a series of decidedly off-trail skis, whereas the EXP 100 HD sits at the top of an Experience family that’s comprised primarily of Frontside models. As befits the leader of the Experience clan, the 100 is the most powerful, with two sheets of Titanal under the hood, and the most demanding.
Although the new Soul 7 HD looks dramatically different from earlier editions, its basic shape and character haven’t changed. While the sexy-looking tip gets all the attention in the store, the Soul 7 HD’s most distinctive feature on the snow is its springy camber pocket that unloads with an elevating pop off the bottom of every arc. This gives the ski its energetic personality that persists in all forms of powder, from Sierra sludge to Wasatch Champagne.
Rossi declines its Experience/Temptation series, which is marketing babble for presenting a hierarchy driven by a relationship between price and performance. The Temptation 84 HD is a step off the pinnacle of the women’s product pyramid, so it isn’t geared to impress experts but to coddle intermediates. The un-tapered sidecut is made to maintain continuous edge contact, the Grail of on-trail technique. With its new HD embellishment, the Temptation 84 has the stuffing to withstand the buffeting inherent in off-trail travel, but it still prefers to engage its tidy, 13m sidecut (162cm) on more consistent terrain.