Making lighter weight skis has been a Salomon specialty since it concocted the first commercially successful monocoque skis many moons ago. Now Salomon has made its best women’s powder ski ever, the QST Stella 106, that proudly sports “Full Sandwich Sidewalls 360o” or expressed in generic terms, a square sidewall, the very design feature that the monocoque cap obsoleted for several seasons.
If you take its integrated bindings out of the equation, the XDR 84 Ti would only weigh 1,620g at 170cm, which is not a lot for any ski and really featherweight for a Frontside model. That it still holds a solid edge on hard snow is testament to how well C/FX helps dampen vibration without the added heft of metal. One advantage of lighter weight is the ski automatically feels quicker, able to flip from one edge to the other on a whim.
The Salomon QST 118 is like the A student who doesn’t want to go to class; it knows how to carve, but it would rather skip all that carving pedantry and smudge its way through life. If challenged to etch a series of clean, long-radius figures it can rise to the occasion, but why carve when you can smear? The QST 118 is so crazy-simple to foot-steer, drifting from turn to turn feels like being carried down the hill.
While the QST 92 isn’t daunted by firm snow, flat terrain isn’t its native habitat. It’s most at home in about of foot of new, or at least recent, snow, where its tapered tip and double rockered baseline do their best work. As I mentioned in last year’s review, that it’s as light as a salad for lunch makes the QST 92 all the easier to toss around in tight quarters like trees and chutes.
For the Finesse skier, the Salomon QST 99 has a lot to offer. It has a big sweet spot, it responds to relatively low doses of skier-applied pressure, the forebody pulls the skier into a comfortable, medium-radius turn and the tail releases automatically. Best of all, it has the chameleon quality of carving like a champ on groomers yet as soon as it detects soft snow it morphs into a surfy, terrain-absorbing off-piste ski.