The Elite LT Ti is so mellow it permits you to drift without protest, but it’s so exhilarating to give it the gas that you won’t want to scrub speed until the lift line. For the strong skier, the Elite LT Ti is probably the best of the hard snow Rossis. As Matt from Footloose observes, “Comparatively speaking, this ski has more to offer than the Pursuit 800: more performance, dampening, horsepower and versatility.”
Rossi’s Super 7 HD is one of those skis with nothing wrong with it that they keep on improving anyway. This time Rossi revamped its Air Tip so its surface is an extension of the same topsheet that covers the rest of the ski. The new Air Tip 2.0 is not only better integrated, it’s also thinner, which seems to help it roll to the edge with the willingness of a svelter ski. On edge at the top of the turn, the attitude of the Super 7 HD is all business, but at the bottom it throws a party, releasing the energy coiled in its fiberglass and carbon core.
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.
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.
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.