2025 Salomon Stance 96

Two winters ago, I was able to ski all the new Stances on several occasions, from a foot of fresh to manicured corduroy. The more I skied them, the more I was led to a conclusion that, at first, I didn’t quite believe: they all ski remarkably alike. That may sound like a particularly unremarkable observation: if they’re all built the same way, why shouldn’t they ski alike? Fair enough, but it’s rarely the case that all members of a product family ski identically, and in the case of the new Stances, they don’t just ski kinda like their siblings: any two adjacent widths are all but indistinguishable on the snow, particularly in the off-trail conditions they were made for. The obvious implication of this interchangeability is that the middle-of-the-range, All-Mountain West Stance 96 not only exhibits the same quickness to the edge as the All-Mountain East Stance 90 displays on a groomer, it also mimics the Big Mountain Stance 102’s Finesse properties in broken powder. That’s a great thumbnail description of what one hopes to find in any All-Mountain West model. Every tester account makes some reference to how easy the Stance 96 is to guide into a smooth, balanced turn that it exits as gracefully as it enters. Like most of the double-rockered skis in its genre, the Stance 96 uses a tapered tip that isn’t going to connect to the tippy-top of a carved turn, but once one accepts that the shovel is just there as a terrain buffer, the skier can focus on how well it holds from the forebody back to the end of its square tail. Skiers who want to smash through crud at max velocity have plenty of other options; the Stance 96 is more for the technician than the daredevil. Its defining trait is its predictability, moving confidently from turn to turn whether the snow surface is perfectly manicured or a hot mess that’s never seen a grooming machine.