Let the record show that no ski made as giant a leap forward last year as the Salomon QST 92. In its two earlier incarnations it barely met our Recommended minimum standards, hanging by a thread on the tail end of the Finesse ski standings. Now it resides near the top of our Finesse rankings, and the result is no fluke.
When Salomon introduced the QST line, it needed to hit multiple price points, so the wider skis got the best tech while the lower-priced QST 92 was built less expensively. In 2020, the QST 92 got the same treatment as its wider mates, the QST 99 and QST 106, and the difference was evident from the first edge set.
The current QST 92 has more of everything you want – edging power on trail, a better shape for off-trail, a more solid platform – and less of what you don’t want: tip chatter, indifferent grip, overall looseness. Salomon pulled off this coup by reconfiguring how it used its primary components, flax, basalt and, of course, carbon. The basalt and carbon are woven together in an end-to-end matrix, while the flax gets its own mat directly underfoot. An all-poplar core is reinforced by a patch of Titanal in the mid-section and finished with new cork inserts in the tip and tail.
One reason the QST 106 is able to impose its will on combative crud, is it isn’t as light as you might expect for the flagship of a series dedicated to off-trail travel. Although it deploys a combination of fibers as its primary structural element – which doesn’t sound heavy – its stout sidewalls and Ti plate contribute to a total weight that’s roughly average for the genre.
I confess I’ve been maintaining a soft-snow-days only liaison with a QST 106 since we first met, so my bias in its favor is engrained. I’m now seeing a 181cm 106, which strikes me as the perfect blend of flotation for soft snow and grip on hard snow. Instead of dreading the latter, I find the QST 106 to be so natural and imbued with fluid fortitude that I stop noticing its width and simply ski. Even as the rpm’s ascend it stays the course, riding a laid-over edge with the confidence of a soft GS race ski.
When all its scores are tallied, the QST 106 ranks as one of the three best skis in the Big Mountain genre. Salomon hasn’t made a ski this good since the legendary X-Scream. The QST 106 is the best current embodiment of Salomon’s tradition of innovation in ski design.
Because of its brilliant balance between Power and Finesse virtues, we again award the QST 106 a Silver Skier Selection.
You can tell a lot about a ski by its immediate family. Rossi’s Hero Elite Plus Ti is closely related to the Hero Elite LT Ti and ST Ti, both legit non-FIS Race models, even though the Plus Ti’s plus-sized shape (78mm) is many mm’s more ample than the 71mm waist of the LT Ti and 68mm midriff on the SL Ti. The Hero Elite Plus Ti not only uses the same construction as its gate-bashing sibs, its sidecut radius is the same as the ST’s in the167cm size preferred by slalom specialists.
Three years ago, Rossi converted all of the Hero Elite clan to a new damping system, Line Control Technology (LCT). Instead of using horizontal sheets of Titanal, as has been the case for decades among race models, LCT uses a vertical Ti laminate down the center of the ski so the forebody is more resistant to deflection. Torsional rigidity is softened a tad to allow the deep sidecut to engage gradually and progressively as the ski is tipped and pressured.
Advanced skiers who wouldn’t ordinarily care to expend the energy required to control a true race ski shouldn’t allow the Hero Elite Plus Ti’s pedigree to scare them away. It’s amenable to making any turn shape and is well-behaved whether puttering along at an intermediate’s cross-hill crawl or assisting an expert’s all-out assault on the fall line.
If you digest all the brochure copy expended on All-Mountain East models, you’ll find somewhere in every model description that it’s a “50/50” model, meaning it’s equally suited to skiing on-trail or off. What this seemingly innocuous shorthand term for a versatile ski masks is that no ski can ever truly be half-and-half, for every model is part of a design family that’s inherently biased to one side of the mountain or the other.
This prelude explains why Salomon felt compelled to create a second off-trail line, named Stance, when they already had a successful freeride series in the QST’s. The latter are unmistakably meant for the off-piste, so the QST 92 has the shape and construction of the series’ flagship, the QST 106. This means, among other things, that the AME QST 92 strives to be wide beam-to-beam along its entire length and aside from a mounting plate it has no metal in it.
The Stance 90 tilts the 50/50 equation in favor of Frontside features, beginning with two sheets of Titanal and a shallower sidecut with a more slender silhouette (126/90/108) that’s quicker edge to edge. Its square tail in particular is appreciably narrower than the norm in the AME genre, which keeps its orientation down the fall line.
One way to grok the role played by the Stance 96 in Salomon’s line is to look at its counterpart in Salomon’s QST collection, the new QST 98. Earlier versions of this QST included on-trail features like super-wide tips and multiple doses of shock-dampening fibers, but the new QST 98 has a clear bias for off-trail conditions. Salomon can afford to tilt the QST towards side-of-the-trail conditions because the Stance 96 is so rock-solid on groomers.
If you want to play with the big boys at the head of the AMW pack, you have to use the same materials, so the Stance 96 sandwiches its poplar core with laminates of Titanal and carbon-flax fiber (CF/X), a double dose of dampeners that keep the Stance 96 planted on the planet. The only acknowledgement that it’s up for heading off trail is a rockered tip that feels a little lost when it hasn’t any loose snow under it to give it something to do.
The Stance 96 handles speed well, which is a good thing as it likes to hew closely to the fall line. A rectangular cutout in the Titanal topsheet pares off a few ounces so the Stance 96 feels a little more agile than its girth would suggest, but it imparts a sensation of imperturbable solidity more than playfulness.
