Prior to the 22/23 season, Fischer had subdivided its Ranger family of off-trail models into two distinct clans, indicated by their suffixes: Ti, for those with metal in the mix, and FR, for those without. Among Fischer aficionados, the softer and surfier Ranger FR models had a more distinct, looser character that distinguished them from the large cadre of all-mountain skis with metal in them. In the Realskiers scoring system, which favors snow connection over smearing, the Old School Ti models would consistently out-perform the New School FR’s, but it was clear from the tester comments that the Ranger FR’s had a bigger fan club.
Two seasons ago, Fischer unveiled an entirely new Ranger series, ushered from the drawing board to the ski shop wall by none other than Mike Hattrup, who recently earned a well-merited induction into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. As one might expect from a mash-up of the old FR and Ti branches of the family, some of each genome is entwined in models like the Ranger 96.
Like the Ti’s of yesteryear, there’s metal in the latest hybrid Rangers, just not as much as before. The metal is confined to the area underfoot, and while there are some changes in how the metal part is configured across the line, none possess enough Titanal to suppress the loose extremities that appealed to FR fans. Because the metal is mostly underfoot, the tip and tail feel lighter, easier to pivot sideways and generally more genial than a ski with tip-to-tail Ti laminates. 258
As is often the case, the metal plate in the middle extends its influence beyond its boundaries, so the Ranger 96 feels secure all along the tail. On balance, the 2025 hybrid Ranger behaves more like the FR side of its pedigree, albeit with a stouter tail that holds up under the sustained pressure of a long-radius turn.
Kästle’s MSRP’s hover near the peak of the retail pricing mountain, where the air is so thin only a few brands can survive in it. Kästle’s relatively new Czech ownership wants to expand the line by dropping a few experimental models down to a lower altitude, where the people, particularly less affluent younger people, can afford to acquire them.
Hence the ‘Z” in its name, a reference to Gen Z, otherwise known as young adults. The first foray in this direction was the ZX108, a non-metal, robustly rockered Big Mountain model with surprising moxie, introduced just two seasons ago. The ZX100 is its first offspring, with a retail tag of $649, a pittance for a Kästle and right in line with the rest of the market.
The low price wouldn’t be worth much if the ski couldn’t cut it, but the ZX100 is a knockout, particularly in the softer snow it’s made for. This became evident on a spring day at Mt. Rose, where the snow surface evolved from boilerplate to mush in the span of three hours. As soon as the top surface became loose enough to dislodge, the ZX100 was in its element. Its classic wood-and-fiberglass sandwich is strong on the edge and peppy coming off it. It’s sidecut is also right out of the time-honored playbook, with just a little more shape and tip-to-tail taper angle than the norm. Without metal to dampen its response to pressure, the ZX100 feels quick and lively even though its natural sidecut radius is 18m in a 180cm and short turns aren’t really its wheelhouse.
Its balanced flex feels easy to stay centered on, where the skier can instantly switch between smooth smears and sharp edge sets as the ZX100 hews closely to the fall line. If you want to make a tighter turn that’s more carve than swivel, be prepared to work for it, but that’s the case for just about every ski in this genre.
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.
Völkl has built an enviable reputation for its high-performance women’s skis, despite the fact that many of its most revered models – the Aura, Kiku and Kenja, for example – weren’t really women-specific models, but unisex skis in short sizes. The Secret 96 falls squarely in this tradition, for it faithfully mimics the construction of the new men’s M7 Mantra.
What makes the M7/Secret 96 design so remarkable is how its various features work together to create a ginormous performance envelope. One of its foundational elements is Tailored Titanal Frame, that breaks the usual topsheet of Titanal into three separate parts: two long-armed horseshoes wrap around the tip and tail, and a thinner, disconnected plate rides in the center. Just below this Titanal triad is a long slab of fiberglass, a coiled spring just waiting to be energized by compression. The fusion of the metal and fiberglass elements is what gives the Secret 96 its peppy rebound, a trait not often found in wide, all-terrain skis.
In the same iconoclastic vein, the two new features that elevate the performance ceiling of the 2025 Secret 96 – 4 Radius Drive and Tailored Carbon Tips – focus on sharpening the short-radius aptitude of the very tip of the ski, where every other ski that calls itself “all-mountain” is rockered entirely out of contact. The new features are meant to enhance the Secret’s ability to cut a clean, sharp corner into a short-radius arc, a level of steering accuracy that no other ski in the genre can match.
Nordica has been fiddling with the ideal formula for a women’s all-mountain ski over the course of several product cycles. Four years ago, Nordica solved the riddle of how much metal a wide women’s ski needs to assist stability without smothering agility. Dubbed Terrain-Specific Metal, the construction drops the bottom Ti laminate and trims the top layer down to match the likely terrain each Santa Ana was most likely to encounter. As the second-widest ski in the series, the SA 97 scallops out a larger chunk of Ti in the forebody so the ski feels more lively than lugubrious.
For 2025, all the Santa Anas were scrupulously modified to optimize each length in each model, tweaking sidecut and sizing options on the outside and remodeling the core on the inside. The new Pulse core sandwiches a layer of elastomer between two wood cores, creating an easy-to-flex midsection that delivers a smooth ride in rough terrain. The new core allows the lighter-weight skier to bend a ski with the gripping power of Titanal, simultaneously elevating both the Power and Finesse properties of the Santa Ana 97. For the talented women who already knows how to attack a crud field, the Santa Ana 97 delivers on every front. The new design exhibits the rare ability to open up the top of the ski’s performance range but still be so easy to steer that the less skilled skier can confidently make her first forays far off-trail.
